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The Confederate Flag

Is the Flag of the Confederate States of America really a symbol of hate and intolerance?

If you’ve been watching the news lately, you might be aware that the Confederate Flag is being further thrust into the darkness. It’s been banned left and right within the Southeastern US over the last few years: South Carolina’s capital building, sporting events, license plates, and so forth. Indeed it would seem that the Flag of CSA is quickly becoming the next swastika. Now I have never been a proponent of racism, unfair treatment, discrimination, or anything resembling such, but I find it utterly appalling that the very memory of the Confederacy is not only being swept under the rug, but outright hunted down and snuffed out.

The very first Confederate Flag.

What is commonly known as the “Confederate Flag”

Southerners have a right to display their heritage; instead we are being taught to be ashamed of it.  When most people think of the Confederacy, they immediately move to slavery.  In fact, in their eyes, “Confederacy” might as well be a synonym for “slavery.”  But the Civil War wasn’t just about slavery.  It was, like most wars, essentially an issue of economics and greed (on the part of both parties).  Why shouldn’t we have the right to fly a Confederate Flag?  Our ancestors fought and died in a war that they believed in, and we are systematically being told that celebrating this is not only distasteful, but a perpetuation of hate.

What the average non-Southerner doesn’t usually take the time to think about is that not every Southerner owned slaves.  In fact, most didn’t.  It’s no different than how it is today – you had the richest 1% – 5% who owned 95% – 99% of the capital….and then everyone else.  The men who fought and died in the Civil War were not fighting for slaves.  They were fighting for a way of life, for a heritage, for a culture that was on the brink of extinction.    Furthermore, the South lost the damn war, so how is flying the Flag of CSA a symbol of hatred?  We’re not rubbing it in anyone’s face…to even display the Flag is to admit that we lost.

What we commonly know as the “Confederate Flag” was never an official flag of the CSA, rather a Northern Virginia battle flag. The CSA had three flags during it’s lifetime: top left or “Stars and Bars” itself went through 3 iterations with stars continually added; top right was the 2nd official flag of the CSA, and the bottom was the flag adopted just prior to the end of the Civil War.

I don’t personally feel a strong enough connection with the Confederacy to fly the flag myself, but I damn sure would and will defend the right of others to fly it.  Sure the South still has its share of racists (as does everywhere else in the country), but the Flag certainly doesn’t exacerbate the issues.  It’s funny how people think that the South marginalized and discriminated against blacks, and now Southerners themselves are stereotyped as being ignorant, racially charged, and belligerently supremacist.  The nay-sayers could use a lesson in intolerance themselves.

We like to think that “freedom of speech” is real, but it’s not.  Don’t even get me started on how corporations own every little morsel of the media…but beyond that, freedom of speech was enacted to protect unpopular speech.  That’s exactly what was intended: the right for people to go against the grain, against what might be considered socially acceptable, against their government, against the status quo.  Sadly, we live in a sort of manufactured liberalism that isn’t truly liberal at all.  We, as a culture (especially the generation that’s just starting to mature and coming into their college years), have become PC (politically correct) to the point of absurdity.  It has become a Sisyphean exercise to not step on someone’s toes.  As a result, we are becoming tolerant to all the wrong things.

Where does it say that we, as Americans, have the right not to be offended?  Free speech is offensive.  People are going to get offended.  And when we start trying to brainwash everyone into being as inoffensive as possible, not only do we become extremely boring, but also extremely dangerous.  Liberals have become so caught up in the idea of liberalism, tolerance, acceptance, and so forth that they’ve become a very monotonous, annoying, and robotic group of idealists.  Let’s get real again.  Let’s start going against the grain again.  Let’s speak up and speak out – a CSA Flag can’t hurt anyone – it’s a design on a piece of cloth/canvas/plastic/whatever.  If people choose to interpret this as a symbol of hate, let them.  It’s their problem, not yours.

Banning something as simple as a flag that stood for something that never quite came to be 150 years ago is not only stupid, but also a weird representation of some of the very scary socialist leanings that have been growing in America.  It’s a flag – get over it and move on.  But no, it’s not that simple.  People can’t fathom that the South was defending its way of life in a much bigger sense than slavery.  The CSA tried to do something reasonable and secede. They said, in a nutshell, if this is what America is going to be, then we won’t be a part of it.  But that wasn’t good enough – the North chased after us, not wholly dissimilar from America declaring its independence from Great Britain.  The Southerners were willing to live and let live, and it was the North who was the aggressor.

Doesn’t this seem reasonable???

Now I’m not saying that I believe in slavery, or that it was any more “right” back then than it is today, but it was commonplace, it was a fact of life, it was a phenomenon that had persisted throughout almost every culture at some point or another for thousands of years!  Slave holders may have been misguided, but many of them did not believe that they were doing anything was wrong.  What if suddenly the nation determined that computers had souls and wanted to take them away from you…would you fight?  I know it’s not exactly the same thing, but imagine having something you’ve depended on all your life forcibly taken from you…

But even still, slavery wasn’t and isn’t what the Flag of the CSA stood or stands for.  Would anyone be upset if I celebrated the fact that I’m from North Carolina?  Of course not.  The issue seems to be that no one in their right mind could be proud of being in the Confederacy.  But men died for what they believed in, and why we can’t at least acknowledge and celebrate and remember that?  If nothing else, it’s just a symbol, and aren’t we supposed to be better than that in our infinite liberal wisdom?

History, as they say, is written by the winners….but if the color of one’s skin truly doesn’t matter, why should the color of one’s flag?

Written by The Cubist