The nugget., August 23, 2017, Page 17, Image 17

Wednesday, August 23, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
17
Commentary...
The Confederate flag and the unreconstructed
By Jim Cornelius
News Editor
When I was a young
man of about 20 or so, I had
a Confederate battle flag
sticker on the back window
of my Chevy Impala.
Where the stars of the
(misnamed) Stars and Bars
would usually be, were
t h e l e t t e r s “ LY N Y R D
SKYNYRD.” Yep. What
that flag meant to me was
… Southern Rock! Fly high,
Freebird. Southern music
was then — and remains —
beloved to me. That’s what
I was celebrating. Oh, I also
dug Neil Young, whether or
not a Southern man needed
him around anyhow, and by
then I’d seen more than a cou-
ple of Grateful Dead shows.
If all that seems incongruous,
I’ve got two words for you:
Allman Bros.
I once got pulled over
by a Glendale, California,
police officer for “rolling
through a stop sign.” I didn’t
and I knew it. So did he. He
was a black man, and he
inspected my Confederate
flag with considerable inter-
est. Apparently realizing it
was a band sticker, he sent
me on my way with no ticket,
no warning. But not before a
carload of punks drove by on
Montrose Avenue screaming
“Nigger!”
Symbols are powerful
things. Men will die for them.
The same symbol can carry
multiple and profoundly dif-
ferent meanings to different
people. What for me repre-
sented a deep, rich musical
heritage, seasoned with out-
door living and the pleasures
of life as a whiskey rock-a-
roller, represents a century
of murderous racial oppres-
sion to the descendants of
slaves. Neither is a “wrong”
interpretation of a symbol
— because we all assign and
receive meaning through our
individual and cultural per-
spective and perception.
But basic decency and
good manners require some
level of recognition that
my Lynyrd Skynyrd trib-
ute looked like something a
whole lot less wholesome to
that black cop in Glendale.
Took me a while to fig-
ure that out, but I got there.
On my own, too, with no
thanks to hectoring from
cultural scolds. I don’t fly a
Confederate flag of any sort
anymore. And, by the way,
for the most part neither
does what’s left of Lynyrd
Skynyrd.
The “heritage, not hate”
defense of the Confederate
flag gets pretty hard to sustain
when hateful people throw
it up like a middle finger to
those for whom it represents
nothing but pain. And, hon-
estly, the heritage can’t and
shouldn’t be scrubbed clean.
Unreconstructed Southern
apologists and neo-Confeder-
ates argue that the Civil War
was not really about slav-
ery. That argument doesn’t
hold up to even the most
cursory scrutiny. Defense
of slavery is integral to the
founding documents of the
Confederate states.
In its secession declara-
tion, South Carolina stated
that:
“A geographical line
has been drawn across the
Union, and all the States
north of that line have united
in the election of a man to the
high office of President of the
United States, whose opinions
and purposes are hostile to
slavery. He is to be entrusted
with the administration of
the common Government,
because he has declared
that that ‘Government can-
not endure permanently half
slave, half free,’ and that the
public mind must rest in the
belief that slavery is in the
course of ultimate extinction.
“This sectional combina-
tion for the submersion of
the Constitution, has been
aided in some of the States by
elevating to citizenship, per-
sons who, by the supreme law
of the land, are incapable of
becoming citizens; and their
votes have been used to inau-
gurate a new policy, hostile
to the South, and destructive
of its beliefs and safety…”
Texas, too, placed the
defense of the institution of
slavery at the center of its act
of secession:
“…in this free government
all white men are and of right
ought to be entitled to equal
civil and political rights; that
the servitude of the African
race, as existing in these
States, is mutually beneficial
to both bond and free, and is
abundantly authorized and
justified by the experience of
mankind, and the revealed
will of the Almighty Creator,
as recognized by all Christian
nations; while the destruc-
tion of the existing relations
between the two races, as
advocated by our sectional
enemies, would bring inevi-
table calamities upon both
and desolation upon the fif-
teen slave-holding states…”
And on and on.
Recognizing that, yes,
slavery was central to the
great conflict does not mean
that those who feel an attach-
ment to “Southern” ways
or who have ancestors who
fought for the Confederacy
should be made to writhe
in eternal guilt over sins
and crimes that they did not
themselves perpetrate. Nor
does removing all vestiges
of Confederate heritage from
the public sphere or harassing
historical reenactors who are
trying to touch the past serve
a beneficial purpose.
The history should neither
be whitewashed nor hidden
away in a musty attic. Far
better for all of us to genu-
inely confront our fraught
racial heritage, which con-
tinues to reverberate down
through the centuries to the
present day.
That takes study — not
with a goal of proving your-
self right and someone else
wrong — but with the pur-
pose of genuine understand-
ing. It requires dialogue
— not shouting across bar-
ricades. And it requires hon-
esty — which, in the USA of
2017, is in dire short supply.
Big wheels, keep on
turning.