Did you know that it’s Confederate Heritage Month in Alabama? Eight states still have special Confederate holidays, but Alabama bolsters its Confederate Memorial Day (which popped up this Monday) with a month-long celebration of all that is slave-holding and treasonous.
This gave the Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill another opportunity to play things Confederate sympathizers say.
“Are you going to take a bulldozer to the monument and forget what people fought for to preserve a way of life that makes us special and unique?” …
Civil rights groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, slammed the remark as “shameful.” But in a follow-up conversation with ThinkProgress, Merrill explained that the “way of life” he celebrates is based on Confederate soldiers’ independent spirit, not their advocacy for slavery.
Special equals “Independent spirit.” So, it’s the treason he likes, not the slavery?
“When we have things happen in our state, we don’t rely on the federal government to come take care of us,” he said. “We take care of ourselves. For example, after the tornadoes in 2011, or after the massive flooding we had. That’s who we are. That’s who these people were. I’m proud of that.”
Even if you ignore the fact that Alabama founded its take-care-of-ourselves economy on the backs of thousands of unpaid slaves, there’s still that problem where Alabama is actually in the top ten states when it comes receiving aid from the federal government. Alabama
ranks 49th then it comes to comparing overall givers and takers, and gets back about $3 for every dollar sent to the
yankees feds.
A number of states have been feeling slightly more ashamed of the traitors and slave-holders that decorate their town-squares, but it’s far from a universal attitude.
… many states are moving in the opposite direction. Like Alabama, Mississippi is celebrating its Confederate heritage this month, yet discussion of the slavery the state once depended on is almost entirely absent from official state proclamations of the holiday — which includes only a vague allusion to “mistakes.” The state also rejected a push in February to remove the Confederate cross from its state flag.