What is the function of a flag?
In my disinterested opinion, a flag is a symbol of a Belief or a
Place. A flag or banner containing a cross indicates a belief in
Jesus Christ. A flag with 13 alternating red and white stripes, with
a blue field filled with 50 stars, tells me that it represents the
United States of America. A light blue flag with orange and gold
zigzag stripes and dueling Humming Birds, means absolutely nothing to
me.
National flags, such as the Stars and Stripes, not only represent a
geographical territory, but to the citizens that flag represents the
history and traditions of that nation.
So what can we say regarding the confederate flag. There is no
Confederacy for it to represent. Does it represent the history and
traditions that were of the short-lived confederacy? If not, then
what does it represent. To say it represents the pride of the South
is to suggest that this includes the Southern Traditions. That
tradition of the short-lived confederacy included slavery. Wouldn't
it seem better to design a new flag, proclaiming the goodness and love
of the New South toward all people of all color and ffaith?
Carl Jarvis
On 7/4/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If the author of this hadn't been who it is, I would have skipped it
because
so much has been written about the subject.
Miriam
Kingsolver writes: "My little town is proud to have reared citizens like
Carolee, an honour student and star athlete who offers a helping hand to
anyone she meets. She wears her blonde hair in a ponytail and a delicate
tattoo on her wrist. It's the Confederate battle flag."
Kingsolver: 'Around here we see it on license plates and T-shirts. A ragged
one has hung for years on the side of a barn in my neighborhood.' (photo:
Stephen Morton/Getty)
A View From the South: Let the Confederate Flag Go
By Barbara Kingsolver, Guardian UK
04 July 15
The Confederate emblem was about pride as well as hatred, but racists have
twisted its meaning
My little town is proud to have reared citizens like Carolee, an honour
student and star athlete who offers a helping hand to anyone she meets. She
wears her blonde hair in a ponytail and a delicate tattoo on her wrist.
It’s
the Confederate battle flag.
That flag has come crashing into the global conversation after an avowed
white supremacist massacred nine parishioners in an African Methodist
Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina. He tore up hearts and
families, left a state without its senator and a nation bereft. A crime so
senseless leaves us grappling for something we can blame, or fix. We’re
sickened by Dylann Roof’s self-portrait with a semi-automatic pistol and
Confederate flag. In the wider world where it’s seldom seen, people must
wonder how that emblem waved by a racist vigilante could ever have held
appeal for local historians or thoughtful honour students.
No story is ever simple here in the south, least of all the American civil
war. It’s easily reduced to a morality play – a conflict between
northerners
who wished to abolish slavery (the Union) and southern whites who refused
(the Confederate rebels). In that version, any invocation of the lost
Confederacy looks like nostalgia for slavery’s return.
But history is nuanced. Economics divided an industrialising north from an
agrarian south, where cotton plantations exploited enslaved labour for
their
solvency. Most white southerners, of course, didn’t own plantations or
other
humans. Poor farmers and sharecroppers were brutally conscripted to fight
for the interests of wealthier men. The region where I live – southern
Appalachia, was occupied to enforce compliance.
Bullets, illness and starvation killed hundreds of thousands during that
brief Confederacy, and some six generations later, families still decorate
the graves. Some feel their ancestors are as nobly and tragically dead as
any soldiers under any flag, and would honour them independently of the
worth of the war that consumed them – a distinction we’ve accepted since
the
moral quandary of Vietnam. If the Confederate flag only flew over
cemeteries, the discussion would be over.
But it doesn’t. Around here we see it on licence plates and T-shirts. A
ragged one has hung for years on the side of a barn in my neighbourhood,
making me wince daily. My neighbour is a decent person, so far as I’ve
seen.
I can only guess he nailed it up in a spirit of defiance, maybe akin to the
way some rappers use the N-word: as a belligerent gesture of identity
politics. Southerners, especially Appalachians, live in a shadow of
condescension. Popular culture wages a steady war on our dignity, decking
us
out as ignorant, vaguely incestuous hayseeds. Reality TV digs deep to find
trashy families to reinforce the stereotype. In a nation with a
hair-trigger
sensitivity to disparaging labels, the word “hillbilly” still flies with
impunity.
Attaching banality or meanness to every element of our culture is unfair,
but defining southern pride is an endless navigation. In our town,
high-school football games are community entertainment. Our team is the
Rebels. My daughter played in the marching band known as the Rebel
Regiment.
We decided to embrace the title: rebels, in my opinion, are the pilots of
most human progress. The school cafeteria once bore a mural of Confederate
soldiers and their flag, but it was painted over decades ago when the
school’s first African-American principal arrived.
Our Rebels’ only remaining civil war tie is the school’s fight song, Dixie.
It’s a simple song about a southerner far from home who wishes he were back
on his native soil, south of the Mason-Dixon line. Countless soldiers
surely
identified with the sentiment, back in the day, but Abraham Lincoln also
used it at campaign rallies – it was never the official anthem of the
Confederacy. I’d vote to retire it anyway, knowing it’s tainted for those
who hear it as such. Alternatives get proposed, without success, because
most people here identify it as the anthem of a touchdown.
‘Dylann Roof tore up hearts and families, left a state without its senator
and a nation bereft … we’re sickened
by his self-portrait with a semi-automatic ¬pistol and Confederate flag.’
(photo: AP)
Who gets to draw the line between tradition and callous intransigence?
Where
does sensitivity become censorship? Tarring whole communities with the
brush
of racism doesn’t bring us grace. I could have whisked my daughter from the
home of the Rebels to a private school where she wouldn’t have to play
Dixie. But this is our home, and I believe public schools function best
when
we all support our kids together. I think they’re better citizens for
having
grown up with many kinds of people, to be judged by the contents of their
characters, not their tattoos.
When I claim my Appalachian identity I’m embracing some things that are
often mocked: the poetry of our dipthong-rich language; a fine-tuned
interest in crops, the weather, and everybody’s business. The fact that
when
I throw a party there will be spontaneous music, and someone will bring
homemade whiskey. The fact that we never say the words “hostess gift” but
would never show up without one. Loving your neighbour is a commandment we
take seriously.
But I don’t have to love his barn art, or the symbolic anti-freedom
fighters
frozen beneath a coat of paint in the school cafeteria. Southern pride
doesn’t mean loving the lynchings, segregation and lingering racial
inequality that have bled into this place, any more than wearing cotton
implies complicity with that crop’s awful history. The modern south, home
to
our nation’s most racially diverse cities, now has organic farms between
tobacco fields, and yoga studios beside churches. My favourite bumper
sticker this year says “Namaste, y’all”.
We don’t want outsiders telling us what we are. So the duty is ours, and
ours alone, to distinguish our past from our future. The Confederate flag
is
anathema to that project. Whatever it meant in the 1860s, since then it has
been deliberately attached to a racist agenda, beginning in 1948 when the
new, segregationist Dixiecrat party dug it out of mothballs. (Dixie, alas,
was their fight song too.)
The flag’s presence has grown steadily more menacing. It turned up wherever
white mobs opposed civil rights marchers. It showed up at Klan rallies. I’m
sure it still does. Swastika was the ancient Sanskrit word for good
fortune,
its symbol representing the movement of the sun across the sky. But it was
appropriated by vile people, and now virtually everyone sees racial hatred
in that one too. Regardless of intent or origin, a symbol achieves its
meaning in the eye of the beholder.
For some folks who incorporate the battle flag into their wardrobe or body
art, familiarity may have made it seem innocuous. But it isn’t. A flag is a
potent symbol, purporting to be the standard of a concordant nation. By
carrying one into hate crimes, racists try to elevate their evil by
suggesting a nation of racists stands behind them.
My southern home is not that nation. This month the Confederate flag
finally
came down from several southern state houses, and my neighbour’s barn. Our
governor banned it from licence plates. The stock car drivers of Nascar,
that bastion of good-ol-boys, expelled it from the racetracks. We’re
honouring heritage by tapping our well of kindness, knowing that for too
many people those colours evoke terror and despair. No more. Now is the
moment in history when we send that flag to the graveyard.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid.
Kingsolver: 'Around here we see it on license plates and T-shirts. A ragged
one has hung for years on the side of a barn in my neighborhood.' (photo:
Stephen Morton/Getty)
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/03/south-flag-confederate-
pride-hatred-racistshttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/03/sou
th-flag-confederate-pride-hatred-racists
A View From the South: Let the Confederate Flag Go
By Barbara Kingsolver, Guardian UK
04 July 15
The Confederate emblem was about pride as well as hatred, but racists have
twisted its meaning
y little town is proud to have reared citizens like Carolee, an honour
student and star athlete who offers a helping hand to anyone she meets. She
wears her blonde hair in a ponytail and a delicate tattoo on her wrist.
It’s
the Confederate battle flag.
That flag has come crashing into the global conversation after an avowed
white supremacist massacred nine parishioners in an African Methodist
Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina. He tore up hearts and
families, left a state without its senator and a nation bereft. A crime so
senseless leaves us grappling for something we can blame, or fix. We’re
sickened by Dylann Roof’s self-portrait with a semi-automatic pistol and
Confederate flag. In the wider world where it’s seldom seen, people must
wonder how that emblem waved by a racist vigilante could ever have held
appeal for local historians or thoughtful honour students.
No story is ever simple here in the south, least of all the American civil
war. It’s easily reduced to a morality play – a conflict between
northerners
who wished to abolish slavery (the Union) and southern whites who refused
(the Confederate rebels). In that version, any invocation of the lost
Confederacy looks like nostalgia for slavery’s return.
But history is nuanced. Economics divided an industrialising north from an
agrarian south, where cotton plantations exploited enslaved labour for
their
solvency. Most white southerners, of course, didn’t own plantations or
other
humans. Poor farmers and sharecroppers were brutally conscripted to fight
for the interests of wealthier men. The region where I live – southern
Appalachia, was occupied to enforce compliance.
Bullets, illness and starvation killed hundreds of thousands during that
brief Confederacy, and some six generations later, families still decorate
the graves. Some feel their ancestors are as nobly and tragically dead as
any soldiers under any flag, and would honour them independently of the
worth of the war that consumed them – a distinction we’ve accepted since
the
moral quandary of Vietnam. If the Confederate flag only flew over
cemeteries, the discussion would be over.
But it doesn’t. Around here we see it on licence plates and T-shirts. A
ragged one has hung for years on the side of a barn in my neighbourhood,
making me wince daily. My neighbour is a decent person, so far as I’ve
seen.
I can only guess he nailed it up in a spirit of defiance, maybe akin to the
way some rappers use the N-word: as a belligerent gesture of identity
politics. Southerners, especially Appalachians, live in a shadow of
condescension. Popular culture wages a steady war on our dignity, decking
us
out as ignorant, vaguely incestuous hayseeds. Reality TV digs deep to find
trashy families to reinforce the stereotype. In a nation with a
hair-trigger
sensitivity to disparaging labels, the word “hillbilly” still flies with
impunity.
Attaching banality or meanness to every element of our culture is unfair,
but defining southern pride is an endless navigation. In our town,
high-school football games are community entertainment. Our team is the
Rebels. My daughter played in the marching band known as the Rebel
Regiment.
We decided to embrace the title: rebels, in my opinion, are the pilots of
most human progress. The school cafeteria once bore a mural of Confederate
soldiers and their flag, but it was painted over decades ago when the
school’s first African-American principal arrived.
Our Rebels’ only remaining civil war tie is the school’s fight song, Dixie.
It’s a simple song about a southerner far from home who wishes he were back
on his native soil, south of the Mason-Dixon line. Countless soldiers
surely
identified with the sentiment, back in the day, but Abraham Lincoln also
used it at campaign rallies – it was never the official anthem of the
Confederacy. I’d vote to retire it anyway, knowing it’s tainted for those
who hear it as such. Alternatives get proposed, without success, because
most people here identify it as the anthem of a touchdown.
‘Dylann Roof tore up hearts and families, left a state without its senator
and a nation bereft … we’re sickened
by his self-portrait with a semi-automatic pistol and Confederate flag.’
(photo: AP)
Who gets to draw the line between tradition and callous intransigence?
Where
does sensitivity become censorship? Tarring whole communities with the
brush
of racism doesn’t bring us grace. I could have whisked my daughter from the
home of the Rebels to a private school where she wouldn’t have to play
Dixie. But this is our home, and I believe public schools function best
when
we all support our kids together. I think they’re better citizens for
having
grown up with many kinds of people, to be judged by the contents of their
characters, not their tattoos.
When I claim my Appalachian identity I’m embracing some things that are
often mocked: the poetry of our dipthong-rich language; a fine-tuned
interest in crops, the weather, and everybody’s business. The fact that
when
I throw a party there will be spontaneous music, and someone will bring
homemade whiskey. The fact that we never say the words “hostess gift” but
would never show up without one. Loving your neighbour is a commandment we
take seriously.
But I don’t have to love his barn art, or the symbolic anti-freedom
fighters
frozen beneath a coat of paint in the school cafeteria. Southern pride
doesn’t mean loving the lynchings, segregation and lingering racial
inequality that have bled into this place, any more than wearing cotton
implies complicity with that crop’s awful history. The modern south, home
to
our nation’s most racially diverse cities, now has organic farms between
tobacco fields, and yoga studios beside churches. My favourite bumper
sticker this year says “Namaste, y’all”.
We don’t want outsiders telling us what we are. So the duty is ours, and
ours alone, to distinguish our past from our future. The Confederate flag
is
anathema to that project. Whatever it meant in the 1860s, since then it has
been deliberately attached to a racist agenda, beginning in 1948 when the
new, segregationist Dixiecrat party dug it out of mothballs. (Dixie, alas,
was their fight song too.)
The flag’s presence has grown steadily more menacing. It turned up wherever
white mobs opposed civil rights marchers. It showed up at Klan rallies. I’m
sure it still does. Swastika was the ancient Sanskrit word for good
fortune,
its symbol representing the movement of the sun across the sky. But it was
appropriated by vile people, and now virtually everyone sees racial hatred
in that one too. Regardless of intent or origin, a symbol achieves its
meaning in the eye of the beholder.
For some folks who incorporate the battle flag into their wardrobe or body
art, familiarity may have made it seem innocuous. But it isn’t. A flag is a
potent symbol, purporting to be the standard of a concordant nation. By
carrying one into hate crimes, racists try to elevate their evil by
suggesting a nation of racists stands behind them.
My southern home is not that nation. This month the Confederate flag
finally
came down from several southern state houses, and my neighbour’s barn. Our
governor banned it from licence plates. The stock car drivers of Nascar,
that bastion of good-ol-boys, expelled it from the racetracks. We’re
honouring heritage by tapping our well of kindness, knowing that for too
many people those colours evoke terror and despair. No more. Now is the
moment in history when we send that flag to the graveyard.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
