... is what the whole Confederate flag "crisis" seems like to me. Once we tear down and burn all Confederate flags and then smash all Southern war monuments, we will have ... what?
Driving past a Confederate flag or monument isn't causing anything at all. Our social ills are pretty well documented and none of them have Confederate memorabilia as a first-, second- or even third-order cause.
This is just a sacrifice to the gods of racial righteousness in the hopes of appeasing them that they might cause good things to happen here in America.
On the plus side, we must run out of books, flags, businesses and statues to smash and burn eventually. One would think that at that point, people will realize that our problems are still with us and will conclude that the causes lie somewhere else.
I think what's happened here is that we aren't getting anybody worth noting stepping forward to loudly support the shooter, and the friends and relatives of the victims went and forgave the guy and don't seem to be trying to whip up racial tensions either. And as a result, we aren't getting anything "newsworthy", like race riots. So all the people who want to write "news" are casting around for something, and grabbed onto the flag thing. Which, as far as I can tell, started with someone asking why every flag flown by the South Carolina state government was at half-staff except the Confederate one on the war memorial, and then snowballed.
ReplyDeleteTim's right, I think. Ann, of course, everybody wants a piece of the action so now we have obscure critics demanding the censorship of the acclaimed film, "Gone With the Wind". The the literary style of the novel, written in 1936 (and like Huckleberry Finn, another target of the thought police), reflects the language of time and place.
ReplyDeleteApparently, the critic has never read the book or seen the movie, which is a coming-of-age story set in the Civil War and Reconstruction period. Or, to be fair, perhaps the plot was too complex for his neuron.