All citizens have the right to fly the Confederate flag
By Chris Plumblee
Student Columnist

Ask yourself this question: is it worse to display something that some people find disturbing because it undermines the authority of the United States, or to burn the U.S. flag in protest to some action taken by the United States? Is it worse to believe that the Confederate Flag is a symbol of heritage and a fight for freedom along the same lines as the American Revolution, or that the United States should withdraw from the world community and strictly deal with her own internal problems until they can be straightened out? The point I’m making, regardless of whether you personally believe that these rights should be protected, is that the Confederate Flag, regardless of how you feel about it, is no more a symbol of hatred than many other things that are fashion statements.

For instance, Malcolm X was a known Anti-Semite, and the Reverend Louis Farrakhan continues in his tradition. It is distasteful to many people that these people are held up as paragons of the fight for equality for African Americans, but that their views on white people, particularly Jews, are skewed. However, nobody disputes the right of these men to say what they want, and nobody disputes the right of other people to support them. I certainly don’t. The fact is these men have one thing that the people who support the Confederate Flag don’t have: status as a minority.

Face it: no matter how much you may disagree initially, the views of people like Farrakhan, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson are skewed in favor of the group that they represent, and they support things that the American community as a whole find distasteful and wrong. I remember when Sharpton came to my hometown after it was completely flooded by Hurricane Floyd and blamed the flooding on the federal government because the dike that was erected to protect Princeville, a predominantly black community, had been built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He said that the Corps of Engineers had purposely built the dike to fail because it was protecting a black community.

Now on the surface this may seem absurd, but consider this hypothetical situation. Let’s say that a tornado ripped through the homes of the affluent and predominantly white people who live on the Augusta National golf course in Georgia. While this may seem like a shame, let’s compound this by having the Reverend Billy Graham drive to Augusta to console the people who were devastated in this storm and blame the tornado on the National Weather Service because the meteorologist was black and the storm was heading toward a predominantly white community. The analogy may not be exact, but I think it’s there.

The Confederate Flag debate is also in this category. I mean, when statements like Sharpton’s are made without raising anyone in the national news media raising an eyebrow or condemning him for having these views, but the right of people who had ancestors fight and die under the Confederate Flag to fly it is restricted, where is the justice?

I wonder about people who worry about this sort of thing constantly. Nobody disputes that America is a land of great freedom, with the United States standing as a paragon among other nations in terms of free speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion. However, the sad part of all this is that we have become a nation of victims.
People are victimized by the evil inherent in the Confederate Flag, and they want it removed not only from monuments to the Confederate soldiers who died fighting for their home states, which they considered more important than a remote federal government in Washington, but also from state flags and from individuals’ homes. What is the difference between tolerating statements against the United States and remembering a nation that is long dead and a belief in states’ rights that has long ago been changed? If you come up with something, I’d be curious to hear it unless it’s that you simply believe that you’re right and that’s enough for you.

Now I’ll give some constructive ideas that I believe may change this position. First, consider that the Confederate States of America is now dead. There is nobody in the South now who has the political know-how and the courage to declare that the South is independent from the North. As a matter of fact, people who claim that “the South is gonna rise again” usually just do it to make people look at them and wonder if they’re crazy. Apparently it’s worked a lot of times in the past. Nobody really thinks that the South is going to stage another civil war just to break free from the North, so everybody can relax.

Second, do the same thing that I do when Sharpton or Jackson or Farrakhan says anything: consider the source. As much as I am proud to be a Southerner, I admit that there are a lot of people who don’t have the education or the raw intellect to hold a rational viewpoint that hasn’t been drummed into them verbatim by people in school. I’m a Southerner, but for me all that means is that I talk kind of slow and that I’m from an area that is vaguely south of the North. I don’t believe that the Confederate Flag is going to be a battle flag for the next Civil War any more than I believe that the flooding in Hurricane Floyd was due to the actions of the federal government. Consider the source when people say things that upset you, and dismiss them if you think that the person trying to convince you that they’re right has no idea what they are thinking themselves.

However, remember that the instinctive view on both sides may be equally flawed. Proud Southerners are just as likely to be wrong about their reasons for flying the flag as others are in their reasons not to fly the flag. However, this does not change the right of any American to fly it.