"Romancing A Lie..."

The St. Petersburg TIMES reported in today's edition that a group calling themselves The Sons of Confederate Veterans have acquired a building permit to erect a 139 foot tall flag pole on privately owned land from which they intend to fly a 30 by 50 foot Confederate flag, touting it to be the "world's largest." The flag shall unfurl just west of downtown Tampa at the confluence of Interstates 4 and 75, two major traffic arteries on which thousands of vehicles transverse daily. This group is currently soliciting private donations to secure the remaining $30,000 in order that the flag may be fabricated. Good luck.

I spent the majority of my earlier youth growing up and going to school in a rural North Carolina crossroads identified by the locals as Scotts. Scotts School provided education for students from grades one through the twelfth. Most grade classes numbered little more than a couple dozen students. To suggest that the predominate mindset of 99% of the local attendees of this institution in the 50's was anything other than extremely bigoted and prejudicial toward blacks is to grossly understate the true facts. My grade school classmates as a rule hated "niggers'" and anyone who either dared speak even suggestively favorably of that race or, sin of all social sins, chose to associate with them. I learned very quickly as a transplanted northern (which too was a highly detrimental strike against my person) these unwavering hard and fast guidelines for being accepted by my peers. While in the fifth grade I narrowly escaped being hurled from the top of four story fire escape by a particularly narrow-minded bullying classmate because I had dared to call into question his basis for condemning blacks based merely on the color of their skin. My early demise was averted when our teacher intervened and suggested with evident disdain that I should perhaps keep my opinions to myself. My "opinions" were for the most part secretly sequestered until my sophomore high school year when my family moved to Winston-Salem and the atmosphere of racial intolerance was personally gauged to be far less severe.

Throughout those early formative years I held close to the personal belief, as taught to me by my Father, that a man's character holds far greater value than the pigment assigned to his particular race. I was, however, unable to escape being ensnared in the romantic belief that the "South" had some how gotten a raw deal in the American Civil War. The notion that I should at minimum hoard my Dixie cups in the advent of the south's return to antebellum prominence held sway in my view that the states of the confederacy had embarked upon a noble cause to preserve a way of life that required no outside interference to preserve. Histories of that conflict for the greatest part concentrate primarily on the battles that were waged to decide the final outcome, that the population of the south were overwhelming sold out to task of protecting hearth and home. The 2005 scholarly book, A People's History of The Civil War by David Williams, lays waste to that notion. The 594 page volume documents on page after page that this war was promoted by the rich elite on both sides of the Mason-Dixon for riches to be gained and fought by the poor who had nothing to be gained and, in the final analysis, everything to be lost. Most assuredly it must be recognized that the Caucasians of every stripe both in the North and the South entertained no love lost for the Southern blacks, believing egregiously that this race of man was beneath them in all aspect of human equality and were set upon this earth to serve no other purpose than to line the pockets of the wealthy landowners of the South and the commanders of manufacturing in the North with even greater riches by the sweat of their brows and the stripes of their whip beaten backs. Yet it must be recognized historically that prejudice aside the greatest majority of the lower economic classes would have preferred to abstain from any personal involvement in the conflict. Again the notion that the South's population of all economic stratum marched lock step into bloody conflict in quest of a lofty patriotic ideal is just a highly varnished and romanticized misstatement of fact.

Which brings me back to the proposed raising of the giant Confederate flag in Tampa. Said John W. Adams, co-chair of the Confederate Veteran's Flags Across Florida, that the flag isn't about racism or slavery. "It's about honoring our ancestors and about celebrating our heritage. It's a historical thing to us." With personal dubiousness that their stated motives are purely void of detectable animosity toward our fellow black citizens, I take abject exception to notion that they have knowledge of any measurable depth of the actual history that plunged this nation into cataclysmic division. Although many acts of valor and heroism were most certainly performed by the men and women in both armies, they pale in comparison to the atrocities of greed and neglect that were perpetrated by the monied elite upon the downtrodden poor, weak and voiceless who were starving on the fields of battle or left to eek out a hand to mouth existence toiling the soil poor plots of land throughout the south. Such a heritage leaves little to celebrate.

The pride of the South lies not in the apologetic years of slavery, nor in the misguided attempts through mortal conflict to preserve this despicable institution, nor in the post Civil War era that stretched into the civil right sixties wherein the blacks were continued to be regarded immorally as second class citizens. No, the pride of the South and this nation as a whole is in its many enlightened and caring citizens who have come to recognize and embrace the truth that God indeed created all men as equals...nothing more and certainly nothing less. My heartfelt prayer is that the proposed Confederate flag shall never see a ray of sunshine or unfurl to a freshening breeze. The era of the Confederacy is dead. It is best left buried.