The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Bob Butler 54]

(01-15-2020, 04:19 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: If antifa switched from sticks and bottles and whatever else to deadlier weapons, what do you have on your side that we have a right to use our firearms to defend ourselves with these days or even shoot them with these days. Me, the rebel flag is nothing more than a symbol associated with southern pride/ southern culture that your liberal goons and morons don't have the right to destroy. Hint...I'm a northerner, if you can do that, what's next? You may want to start packing your bags because we are on to them and the rhetoric is going to start getting nasty. This is warning to a liberal that hasn't come to gripes with the fact that his days are over. Karma is a bitch.

I would add you should read a few of the succession papers, and there is a note written by the designer of the flag that made clear it was intended as a symbol of racism and the southern slave economy.  

It is possible for one symbol to have multiple meanings.  There can be people who sincerely believe they can use the flag to remember some southern heritage.  I will let them pretend when they are visiting some monument or old battlefield.  If the intent of the gathering is to remember the past, I have not much quibble.

But this is a revisionist meaning.  The old south was quite racist in the beginning of the war time, without trace of apology or considering the possibility that they might lose and have to change the meaning of their symbols.  They had to be, given the nature of the economy they were attempting to preserve. The original meaning is the racist one, not to idealize some past that was yet to occur.  I would add that the deplorables participating in a confrontal demonstration intend the flag to take the more confrontational meaning.  If you are going to some sort of white pride event, waving some multi meaning symbol, anyone would be quite justified in applying the original and true meaning of the flag and reading that into the intent of the wielders.

I do remember sitting in the shade of a tree on a hot hot day at the Angle of Gettysburg, overlooking the rolling terrain on which Picket's Charge passed.  A double handful of children supervised by a handful of adults was retracing the charge over the original land.  Well, I must admit that I had just finished the same walk.  I was tempted to make their charge more realistic by yelling 'bang bang'.  As they had left their cars behind on Lee's line, they had to retrace the retreat too.