OPINION:
A company that makes Confederate flags, Alabama Flag & Banner, reported an increase in sales post-Charlottesville — post-leftist mayhem and madness over monuments and statues that tell our nation’s history.
This is predictable. Even Yankees, the fighters for the Union side, don’t like being told what to think. And the course the left has been on lately is marked entirely by signs that say the likes of, “Robert E. Lee is a pig,” “Confederate flags are for neo-Nazis,” and “Thomas Jefferson must go.”
Those who try to argue otherwise — those who try to express the view that protesters of all ilks, from Black Lives Matter to the KKK, have First Amendment rights, or that monuments shouldn’t be destroyed simply because they bring up bad feelings in some — are immediately branded as white nationalists, KKK sympathizers, neo-Nazi organizers.
And Americans, whether Northerners or Southerners, just don’t like being tossed on a trash heap that way. They don’t like being shoved in a box created by the rabidly left and wrongfully labeled a hater, when they’re really a patriot, a lover of the Constitution, a believer in law and order.
So buy away, I say.
Let’s get this straight: The Confederate flag is not in itself racist. It’s a flag and a symbol of Southern resistance and pride, a historical depiction of the banner used by the Confederate Army during Civil War times. And actually, there was more than one design.
Moreover, as USFlag.org notes: “It is necessary to disclaim any connection of these flags to neo-nazis, red-necks, skin-heads and the like. These groups have adopted this flag and desecrated it by their acts. They have no rights to use this flag — it is a flag of honor, designed by the confederacy as a banner representing state’s rights and still revered by the South.”
That’s a good point. Just because someone, or a group of someones, take a symbol with honorable roots and use it for wicked means does not automatically relegate the symbol as wicked. It just means some are trying to use the symbol for purposes for which it wasn’t intended.
It just means somebody’s hijacked the original message. And boy, has the Confederate flag been hijacked.
“Everybody’s got a different reason [for buying the flag],” said Belinda Kennedy, the owner of Alabama Flag & Banner, to AL.com. “By and large, I think people are afraid they may not be able to get it one day.”
No doubt. Political correctness is currently tearing down America’s historical monuments. The cloth Confederate flag is far flimsier, far easier to destroy, than stone and bronze.
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