LETTER: Confederate flag a sign of cowardice
During the Civil War, there were about two dozens versions of the Confederate flags, mostly various Confederate states’ flags. The current popular flag started out as the flag of the Confederated State of Northern Virginia and was modified to become or to be included in other states’ flags.
Eventually it became the war flag for The Confederate States of America. Then it was 1865 and the war was over. The flag was on the losing side.
The flag stuck its head up a few times, supported by the men wearing their bedsheets and hiding their faces going by the name of the Ku Klux Klan, a southern soldiers of the war social group, and a few other hate groups. Again, in the 1950s, when school integration was being forced onto the southern states, this flag showed up. It became more popular in 1962, when the Civil Rights Act was passed.
So now this flag has become the symbol of racial prejudice, and every other hatred of whoever wasn’t part of the flag wavers, but not because there’s anything intrinsically evil about the flag itself. It has become a symbol of evil because hateful people carry it as their banner. They used their hatred to make the Confederate flag a symbol of hatred. Just as Hitler used the swastika and ISIS uses their black flag, the Confederate flag reflects only the people who fly it.
These people pretend that this flag represents some independent, swashbuckling, defy-all-odds heroism .It doesn’t. They pretend that the people who stand with this flag are better than the people against it. They aren’t. This flag does represent the lack of any mental or emotional evolution for over 60 years. Maybe even 150 years. It represents a stagnant devotion to a time that had no logical rationale to support its existence. It represents the advocacy of the suppression of the civil rights of a select few.
Most of us have evolved from the ‘50s, slowly learning that without equality for all, there is no democracy. Without democracy, there is no freedom as we know it. Without equality, there is no justice for all. In fact, without freedom for all, without democracy including all, and without equality guaranteed for all, there can be no guaranteed justice for anyone.
This is what the hateful people who wrap themselves in this flag have made this flag represent. It now stands for no equality, hence no democracy, hence no freedom, and finally no justice. That’s what’s so reprehensible about this symbol: it represents the very opposite for what the United States stands.
It’s a level of traitor or treachery that’s abominably cowardly. It represents an insidious way to destroy our country. Wrap oneself in a flag, then advocate everything evil and blame it on the flag. These people promote and support the ruin and eventual end of the United States, while screaming about their loyalty, their patriotism, and about their own perverse opinions of superiority of one group over all others, all the while yelling their lectures on revisionist or delusional history. This was the path of Hitler and the way of today’s ISIS.
Perhaps, the United States should deal with these people as we dealt with Hitler, Mussolini, bin Laden, and others who wanted our country destroyed. Only instead of killing them, we should sentence them to live without any civil rights or the freedoms the rest of us support. No voting rights, no housing rights, no employment rights, and no level playing field in any way, shape or form.
Let’s see how they’d like living in the way they advocate for others. Maybe they’ll come around to a much better flag.
Raymond E Williams