Once, I was driving, slowly and carefully, down the dirt
road that leads to my house. I always drive slowly and carefully on this road,
because this is a family neighborhood, and children play all over the place
around here. One in particular has been known to pop out of the trees on his
dirt bike, right in front of my car, but I digress.
I was, as usual, driving carefully down the dirt road when
some pimply-faced teenager in a broken-down, rusted-out sh*tbox of a truck came
flying out of a side street, nearly slamming into the front of my reliable,
barely-scratched-and-dented-at-all Subaru. A large Confederate flag on an
honest-to-god flagpole flapped over the bed of his truck. This probably
happened about three years ago, but I’m still pissed off about it, because of
that Confederate flag. Sure, you're free to fly your Confederate flag, but I'm
just as free to make several assumptions about your character, and let me tell
you, none of them are good.
There’s been a lot of debate lately about whether or not
individual Americans and/or state and local government agencies should be
flying the Confederate flag. I’m going to come down firmly on the
anti-Confederate-flag side of this debate. I don’t think anyone has any
business flying the Confederate flag in this day and age. “It’s heritage, not
hate!” you say, but the flaw with that argument is that it pretty clearly is a
heritage of hate, though. If your
heritage includes committing treason and owning human beings as property, well,
those are parts of your heritage that I'd think you'd want to downplay, not
brag about. I mean, people sidle nervously away from me if I mention my abusive
ex or that time my mother castrated a dog, but you're allowed to strut around literally waving a racist flag AND get all
bent out of shape when people ask you not to, like they're getting offended on
purpose just to piss you off? It's all about you, isn't it? No. No it's not.
But, even I have to admit that it’s one thing flying the
Confederate flag in Virginia or South Carolina or some other state that was
actually part of the Confederacy. If your family’s lived in Atlanta for the
past twelve generations and General Sherman personally burned down your
great-great-great-great grandmother, then displaying the Confederate flag on
your property at least kind of makes
sense. Mind you, it still makes you look like someone whose dog would get “inexplicably”
nervous around black people, but it’s more-or-less logical if you leave out the
fact that the Civil War has been over for 152 years. Flying the Confederate
flag in states that were not a part of the Confederacy, such as West Virginia, takes a special kind of disrespect for your
culture and your ancestors. Were you not paying attention in your West
Virginia history class? West Virginia formed
its own government in 1861 and was recognized as a Union state in 1863. We
did this specifically because we didn’t want to secede from the Union. We
didn't want to join the Confederate States of America because we didn't share
their culture or values. The rugged territory in what was then called
Trans-Allegheny Virginia made the establishment of large, profitable
plantations – and the slave labor required to run them – less practical than in
the eastern Tidewater and Piedmont regions, and early settlers consisted mostly
of poor German and Scots-Irish immigrants
who supported their families via subsistence farming in some of the country’s
most remote communities.
Many Trans-Allegheny Virginians always wanted their own state; efforts to establish an independent
state west of the Alleghenies date back to the American Revolution, when Appalachia
was considered the frontier. The Virginia State Constitution of 1829
established property qualifications for suffrage that many of the poorer farmers
in the western part of the state couldn't meet; when you factored the three –
fifths compromise into this, it disenfranchised almost everyone who lived in
the mountains. The eastern planter elite controlled the state legislature and
served their own interests while ignoring the needs of the underrepresented
west. So, when we saw an opportunity to ditch those a—holes, we took it. Immediately.
And now you have the gumption to fly a Confederate flag anyway. What's that funny sound I hear? Oh, right. It's your great-great-great-great grandfather spinning in his grave.
