Respecting our Heritage

After those emails from Hell, anything I write as a straight essay has got to be a let-down. But get used to it! It’s time to get back to having a reg’lar blog.

I respect my heritage. My great-great grandfather fought on the Confederate side in the Civil War. I respect him. But that doesn’t mean I have to celebrate that particular aspect of his life. I don’t know much else about him, except that he was one of six husbands of Minerva Pettit, who cheated on him. He was a farmer in Indian Territory. I don’t think he owned slaves. I think I can respect his memory for other reasons. Even as recently as the generation just before mine, nearly all the members of my family on both sides were racists, sometimes to an alarming extent (although their abuse of blacks was only verbal, as far as I know). I can hate this part of my heritage, even while respecting the many good aspects of their characters.

But in Oklahoma, where I live—especially in the town of Tushka, a few miles north of where I work, a town that has two Confederate flag roadside stands, and where they proudly declare themselves to be Confederates rather than Americans—hundreds of thousands of people (a significant minority of our population of three million) worship the Confederate flag.

What are other people around the world to make of this? They can be excused for thinking that a significant number of Americans still yearn for the days of slavery.

Of course the Confederates were not as evil as the Nazis. But today in Germany you seldom if ever see a swastika or Nazi flag. As a matter of fact, such insignia virtually disappeared right after the War. The Third Reich is part of German history, and they preserve its memory, but they do not celebrate it. They have, collectively as a nation, repented of their evil past. What would you think if, all over rural Germany, you saw Nazi flags waving?

If anything, the Imperial Japanese were worse than the Nazis. But today you almost never see—perhaps never; I don’t know—the Imperial Japanese flag with red rays coming out of the red sun. The Empire of the Sun, the mythic land of Hakkō Ichiyū, is part of the historical heritage of Japan, but they do not celebrate it. They have, collectively as a nation, repented of their evil past. Just recently the prime minister of Japan apologized to South Korea for some events during what they called the Greater East Asian Conflict, which began with the Japanese annexation of Korea. What would you think if, all over rural Japan, you saw Imperial flags waving?

I stopped at a Confederate museum north of Tushka. It had old stuff in it like most museums. But it did not celebrate the Confederacy. It simply preserved its memory. Unlike my stressful visit with a Confederate flag salesman (described in an earlier entry), to whom the Confederacy was an important part of the present, this museum considered the Confederacy to be part of the past. I enjoyed this museum. I have to agree with South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (see, I sometimes agree with Southern Republicans) that the Confederate flag belongs in a museum.

Germany and Japan have repented. The Confederate States of America has not. The former Confederacy is defiant. That is our shame in the eyes of the world.