Confederate flag and our guns: HANDS OFF!

This is our heritage ...

This is our heritage …

... and this is our heritage, too.

… and this is our heritage, too.

Now that the Charleston, South Carolina, church massacre is two weeks in the past, along with the wailing, gnashing of teeth, and making lists of what things should be “banned” because of it, let’s step back and take a calmer look at the whole thing.

Of course, only a moron or a savage would be pleased with the fact that nine African American churchgoers were murdered, in their own church, by a crazed White 21-year-old who believed that blacks were “taking over the country” and “we’ve got to do something about it.” Dylann Roof’s name will go down in American infamy along with those of Benedict Arnold, John Wilkes Booth, Charles Manson and John Hinckley Jr. There is no way that his act can be defended; he has assured that the rest of his life, either short or long, will be spent in prison.

I THINK NEARLY all of us can agree on those judgments. But as usual, President Obama used the tragedy to push his own liberal agenda. In remarks about the mass murder, after formulaic bemoaning about the losses of life and the tragedy for the families, he immediately jumped to, “We’re the only developed country that has mass murders like this. It is too easy to obtain guns in this country.”

In other words, the gun-confiscation argument that the Left has been making in America, for years, and years, and years … “When in doubt, go after citizens’ guns,” seems to be their motto. Talk about there being “too many” guns in private hands in the U.S. Demand stricter “gun controls.” Insist on having more “Gun-Free Zones,” which mainly send a signal to homicidal weirdoes, “Hey, shoot ’em up here — there’s no guns for them to resist with!” And by the way, Mr. President, mass murders like this HAVE happened in other countries — First World countries like ours — and will again.

Obama also indulged himself in a little presidential prerogative, using the word “nigger” during an interview to support his statement that the U.S. is still seething with “racism,” however one might define that grossly bandied-about word. He said that just because we’re not supposed to say the word “nigger” in public any more, doesn’t mean that we’ve been “cured of racism” (there’s that word again!) Of course, the main reason he used the “forbidden word” was his way of saying to White Republicans, “I’m the big nabob in this country, and I’m black, so I can say it. You’re nasty old White racists, so you’d better not ever say it!”

OTHERS HAVE JUMPED on the anti-Southern White bandwagon, demanding that the Confederate Battle Flag which flies over a Confederate memorial on the South Carolina capitol grounds, be taken down immediately, as if it had caused Roof to commit his horrendous act. To be fair, some White South Carolinians have joined the chorus of anti-flag haters, as well as Gov. Nikki Haley, who is of Indian descent and the daughter of immigrants. Of course, it’s a state flag, and if the people of South Carolina, by majority vote, say they want it down, then it SHOULD come down. But it shouldn’t be taken down during a fury of Leftist agitation, just to please the agitators. That’s the way that things get done far too often in our country nowadays, after some disastrous event like the church shootings.

And numerous big store chains, such as Wal-Mart and Amazon, have quickly caved in to the pressure from the racial agitators, and announced that they will no longer stock or sell Confederate flags. Of course, orders to Amazon for such flags zoomed by about 3,000 percent right after the shooting. U.S. Civil War buffs or those wishing to become flag owners, aren’t stupid; they knew that the liberals, led by Obama, would be renewing their decades-old effort to erase the Confederate flag from the face of the earth. And you know what? I’ll bet every single order that came in before Amazon made its announcement, will be filled. Political correctness is fine, but profits are PROFITS!

Over and over again on TV news shows during the past two weeks, even on Fox News, we’ve been told how blacks find the Confederate flag “offensive.” How they see it as “racist.” How they shouldn’t ever have to see it — especially on public property. That it’s part of the “legacy of slavery.”

Well, they can call it that if they want. To many, many more Americans, the Confederate Battle Flag is part of our history. A good friend of mine used to have, on a car he previously owned, a Confederate flag decal. I mentioned to him once that I was a little surprised that he, a political liberal, would have that flag on his vehicle. He summed the thing up perfectly in reply. He said, “It’s the OTHER American flag.”

THINK ABOUT THAT. Look at the flag photo at the top of this article. Two flags, both American, same three colors, but with a different design. The South seceded in 1861, not just so they could continue to “own slaves,” as liberal historians and black agitators like to claim, but also because they felt that the North, larger, more urban, much more populous, becoming heavily industrialized and a polyglot of nationalities due to immigration from Europe, was moving steadily away from the kind of country the Founding Fathers wanted this to be. When the Union Army first invaded the South, the Confederacy regarded it as interlopers marching onto their land, just as sure as the French saw the German soldiers of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 as foreign invaders. The two halves of America had grown apart for a number of reasons since 1776. And yes, slavery was a big one. But not the ONLY one. Southerners felt that their whole way of life was threatened.

Liberals like to talk about how several hundred thousand Union soldiers died in the Civil War “so the slaves could be freed.” What they often fail to include is that, proportional to their population, there were probably more Confederate soldiers killed. And they also fail to note that, while the Confederacy flew several different flags during the four years of war — the Stars and Bars being the first, and the Battle Flag the best known in modern times — the flags all bore the Red, White and Blue, just like the American flag. And the stars, representing the various states. Which leads me, at least, to believe that the Confederates hoped that the war could somehow be resolved in a way that they could rejoin the Union, without giving up their heritage. Of course, things didn’t work out that way.

Another thing that usually gets ignored in debates about the Civil War is that a number of black Southerners — possibly as many as 65,000, according to some estimates — fought for the Confederacy. I mean as real soldiers, carrying firearms — not as drovers or “body servants,” as liberal historians usually insist they were.

YOU SEE, ANOTHER fact that lines up with those in the two preceding paragraphs, is this: In the Civil War, “we” weren’t fighting a foreign foe like the Nazis, or Communist China, or the Viet Cong. We were all Americans, and we were fighting each other. You can call the Southerners “traitors” or “racists” (that word again!), or whatever you want. But they were Americans, just like the Union troops were, and they were every bit as brave, and for the first two years of the Civil War, they won most of the battles.

And speaking of firearms, let’s return to that subject for a moment. As the Confederate flag is a part of our history, so is private ownership of firearms. It’s in our genes, our DNA. Without private ownership of firearms, winning our independence from Great Britain would have been much more difficult. Guns helped settle the frontier; they enabled isolated homesteaders to survive attacks by Indians or White thieves. They’ve made it possible for individual Americans to protect themselves from the burglar, the street hoodlum, and the like. If at least one of those worshippers in the Charleston church had been armed, maybe Dylann Roof would be dead now, and most of those nine people would be alive.

At this moment, there are more firearms privately owned in the United States, than there are people in its population. If a federal government ever actually tried to confiscate all private firearms, how many think that all gun owners would meekly tug their forelocks and hand the their weapons over to federal agents? Fat chance!

Remember, it was the Second Amendment which guaranteed that right — right after the First Amendment, which proclaimed “freedom of speech” for all Americans. And yet, the First Amendment is being squeezed, if not ignored altogether, by government leaders and/or civil rights leaders and/or liberal commentators who are demanding, in effect, that the Confederate flag be chucked into the dustbin of history.

SOME PEOPLE find that flag “offensive”? So what? Tough noogies! There are a lot of things that I find “offensive,” (Rap and Hip Hop at the top of the list), but I don’t demand that they be banished from the earth. I know there are some (and I stress SOME) black people who would reply, “You’ve never been black! You don’t know how painful that flag is to us!” Well, folks, you’ve never been White, either, so don’t lecture me about what’s painful to whom, or whether certain things should be forever after unseen and unheard.

Remember how, a few years ago, after the Taliban took over in Afghanistan, they decided that an ancient set of Buddhist statues on a hillside were “insulting to Islam”? They planted dynamite in the statues and blew them up, destroying them. It sounds to me like these “anti-flag” people are following the example set by the Taliban: “I don’t like the Confederate flag, so it must be banned from America and never displayed again.”

And what’s all this “racism” stuff? Would one of you people who are always spouting that word, please define it for me? Just what is “racism”? Is it, “Too many black men in prison”? How about, “Black drivers disproportionately stopped by police”? Or, “Too many young black men killed by police”? Or, “Blacks disproportionately the victims of poverty”? Do these mis-interpretations of facts constitute “proof of racism”? Speaking of “disproportion,” how about total domination of professional basketball and football, and somewhat less so of professional baseball, by black athletes? Does the fact that so many more black athletes than White ones draw millions of dollars each year in salary, also constitute “racism”? Shoe feels different when it’s on the other foot, doesn’t it? And what about these over-used words, “racist”, and “racism”? When liberals say, “There is still a lot of racism in America,” they mean, “evil WHITE people.” So do you really believe that only White people can be “racist”? That’s nonsense, and you know it.

TO RETURN TO MY MAIN POINT, leave the Confederate flag alone. It hasn’t been representative of an actual government for 150 years. Slavery’s been gone all that time, too. African Americans, you need to “get over it” and get on with your lives. You’ve been taught since childhood to hate, despise, and abhor the Confederate flag, and to demand that it be banished, forever and ever, amen. In recent years increasing numbers of Whites have jumped on the “The flag must go” bandwagon.

Well, how would you feel if the White majority in this country began demanding that all photos of Martin Luther King be taken down from school rooms, legislative chambers, statehouses, wherever? That King’s birthday be demoted from holiday status? That the current totally positive depictions of him in American history books be amended, at least, to include information about his plagiarism, his womanizing, his occasional drunken binges? Why, you’d be purple-faced with rage, of course. And, I imagine, with some cause. Think about that before you continue demanding the abolition of the Battle Flag, which means a lot more than “racism” to a lot of Americans.

A final word on the gun issue: If it were possible, somehow, for the government to ban all private ownership of firearms, and confiscate all or most of them, then we the American people would be totally at that mercy of that government. With the administration we’ve got now, that’s a scary — no, make that appalling — proposition.

And, to wind up this whole thing: You noted above that I mentioned White Americans “jumping on the bandwagon” to ban the Battle Flag. Well, Old Corporal doesn’t jump on bandwagons. He throws rocks at them. “I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference …”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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