To live free in Dixie

So many hot button issues swished on by while I was spending time with my four granddaughters, 2 Supreme Court decision flops, of course, the Confederate flag flap, and Donald Trump flapping in the wind about the taboo subject of illegal immigrants in sanctuary cities.

The Confederate flag flap brewed up quickly after a young white man, Dylan Roof opened fire in a historic black church in Charleston, SC, killing 9 people.  Roof has been linked to having some connection to a white supremacist group, the Council of Conservative Citizens, but it appears he acted alone in committing this heinous crime.  The political left in America lies ready to pounce, so according to Think Progress:

“As journalists scrambled to unearth more information about Roof on Thursday morning, one piece of damning evidence emerged: A Facebook picture of him on top of his car bearing a license plate with different versions of the Confederate flag. In case it wasn’t clear, the flags were surrounded by the words “Confederate States of America.”

To drive the point home further, Roof reportedly told one of his old roommates before the shooting that he “wanted to start a civil war.”

Within hours, social media was flooded with posts and tweets about the Confederate flag, and the word “Confederate” quickly became a trending topic on Twitter. Pieces decrying the flag’s presence on the South Carolina State House grounds began popping up everywhere: Vox’s Zack Beauchamp railed against the historic symbol of the Confederacy, calling its placement on the government property “an insult to Charleston’s victims”; Ta-Nehisi Coates penned a blistering critique of the flag in the Atlantic, aptly titled “Take Down the Confederate Flag—Now”; and The Boston Globe published a scathing political cartoon.”

In what has become the typical cowardly, politically correct response, a few days after the church shootings, Republican governor, Nikki Haley called for the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of SC’s state house.  She stated:

“Today we are here in a moment of unity in our state without ill will to say it is time to remove the flag from our capitol grounds,” said Haley, a Republican and the state’s first non-white governor, while flanked by a diverse group of South Carolina politicians.

“This flag, while an integral part of our past, does not represent the future of our great state,” she said.

Quickly, many private companies rushed to remove Confederate flag merchandise to comply with the new PC edict, but this is only the beginning.  In the near future, expect a high-profile campaign to remove Confederate statues and memorials in the South and of course, the founding fathers who owned slaves must be repudiated too, so their names must be scrubbed from the public consciousness.

I am a Yankee, who has spent most of my adult life in the South.  My ancestors fought for the Union in the US Civil War, but I certainly believe the South paid dearly in that war.  This knee-jerk activism to piggyback the Confederate flag controversy onto this hate-filled killer rests as the standard strategy of the leftists – banishing inanimate objects and words from the public square.  You either comply to their group-think or you are labeled a hater and a racist.

For the thousands upon thousands of Southerners who view the Confederate flag as a symbol of Southern pride and their unique history, being cast with a fell swoop as racists and being ordered about by activists, most of whom don’t even live in the South does nothing to bridge the racial divides in America nor does it have anything  to do with Dylan Roof’s heinous crime.  Whites in the South remain a regional group that it’s fine to stereotype and ridicule as backward redneck racists.

One of my children tried to provoke this debate with me, stating that the Confederate flag shouldn’t be flying over any state houses in the United States and he went so far as to tell me that anyone who wants it there is a racist.  That sort of blanket judgment and avowal, that if I disagree, then I am a racist irked me.  What can you say to someone who already labeled you a racist if you don’t agree with him?  As a Yankee who believes in the US Constitution, I feel very strongly that the good people and their elected representatives in these states need to decide that issue, but as for me, the Confederate flag seemed more like a grits and black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day tradition – a benign part of the cultural flavor of the South.  I don’t care for grits or black-eyed peas and I don’t fly the Confederate flag, but it never bothered me at all that many Southerners do.

Those who want to remove words and history stand prepared to replace it with their own words and a revised history, so save your books on American history and keep an actual dictionary in your home library, as the thought police advance.  What they’re after isn’t to right the wrongs of slavery and our country’s blighted history on race relations.  Their agenda seeks to enslave our minds to an Orwellian model, the terms of which will be fed to us by our PC minders.  I hear rumors, whispering on the progressive wind,  that Washington, D.C. needs to be renamed and the Jefferson monument removed, because we shouldn’t honor slaveholders.  Of course, George Washington freed his slaves in his will, after grappling with the slavery issue throughout his life, but let’s not let facts get in the way of the leftist agenda.