So the following showed up in my Facebook feed...
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THIS IS WHAT THE CONFEDERATE FLAG IS ALL ABOUT! HONOR AND RESPECT!
HERITAGE! NOT HATRED!
Can I get an Amen?
The poster was my cousin's wife. Nice people, but with politics as teabaggy as can be. They have a son who has inherited their politics. Once he posted about the US being a Christian nation; I pointed out that as his background includes Hungarian Jews he was actually excluding his own heritage. He deleted that reply.
So...I know from experience I should just walk away. I'm pretty sure this will not end well. But sometimes, you just can't. My reply below everybody's favorite squiggle.
"I'm not trying to be a jerk...but I just don't understand anyone's attachment to this flag.
Men carrying it marched into battle to destroy the United States of America. And make no mistake about it, the USA we have all spent our entire lives in would not exist had they won.
I don't particularly blame the soldiers. They were used as cannon fodder for the politicians and the wealthy planters who were behind secession.
The politicians and the planters were willing to destroy the country because they feared on some far off day that their ability to treat human beings as property would come to an end. They fired the first shots of that bloody war.
While one army fought to destroy the country, another fought to preserve it. Between 1861 and 1865 two million men joined that army. Many died. Many more were grievously wounded.
Among those wounded was an ancestor of my own. He was of German birth, less than a decade in this country. He enlisted on the 4th of July, 1861.
In June 1864, just days before the scheduled end of his service, his left arm was shattered by a bullet at Cold Harbor. At Cold Harbor that made him one of the lucky ones.
About 3 inches of bone were lost but they stitched the remains together as best they could. In later years, doctors would write that he was acutally worse of than if he'd lost the arm. It was useless and he was in constant pain. It limited his ability to work and he struggled with poverty to the end of his life.
Less than 10 years in the USA...but he fought FOR the country while so many who had been born here fought against it.
In the end, the war won, the United States of America pardoned all those who had fought under the flag of the Confederacy. Their citizenship restored they lived out their days again as Americans.
And if you wish to honor the men who fought for the Confederacy THAT is the way to do it; with the flag of the country they were born in and that welcomed them back when that war was done.
That other flag...it has no heritage; it and the supposed country that flew it lasted about four years.
It has no honor, because had that army won the United States of America would have been no more and human bondage would have endured.
Respect? It's cause deserves no respect, so how can that piece of cloth lay claim to it.
I can not for the life of me imagine why any citizen of the United States of America would feel any kinship for that flag.
And if someone does, I really wish they could explain WHY."