Rebel Flag

    When I was in High School we had great football teams.   Hickory High won their conference 22 times in 25 years and won state 11 or 12 times.  After every touchdown the band would play "Dixieland".  I associated the song with great football but the year after I graduated the school integrated.   Actual, everyone was excited about that because the other local high school, Ridgeview,
had won their games by an average score of 70-0 for several years running.  With them on our side Hickory would be unstoppable. 
    The first sign that everything wasn't going to be as hoped is when the song was changed.  I was home from college and decided to take in a football game and when Hickory scored a touchdown I was expecting Dixieland to play.  I don't know what it was but it certainly wasn't the spirit raising fields of cotton.  When I discovered the song had been changed over prejudice against the song for being prejudicial, I went home. 
  I just didn't understand: no body from Ridgeview high nor their parents, had ever picked cotton on a plantation.  The song wasn't about that but about being proud of who we were and where we were from.  The kid from Ridgeview was just as southern as I was.  I have never been to a reunion or a Hickory High football game since. 
   Now before some of you start accusing me of racial attitudes you better discovery the entire story.  I once flew from Atlanta to San Diego with a black female seatmate.  She was a student at UCLA and she thought I had to be the worst kind of WASP.  At flights end she said she would never forget me and would always consider me a friend. 
   When the schools merged many white families moved so their children could attend the all-white St. Stephens school and someone wrote  a scathing letter against forced bussing and how it was unsafe for the kids.  I wrote a reply informing the people that for six years I walked a mile to school and for three years I then had to catch a bus to take me across town but no one objected then.  The trip was especially grievous since  there was a perfectly good school closer to my home than either the Junior High I walked to or the High School I was bussed to.  I just didn't buy into the argument that the objections to bussing was for the safety of the black kids because they were never concerned about the safety of their own.
   Not long after the football game thing I went to the community center on a Friday night only to discover it was now a private club for the sole purpose of denying entrance to people of African ancestry.  I thought the price of membership way to high for a one time or even an occasional visit.  Funny thing is they had a membership available for me but none for the black kid that wanted to buy one.  So I purchased a membership card and gave it to the rejected fellow. 
  No, that doesn't make me a saint nor an activist.  I just have a keen sense of what is right and what is wrong.  That is something someone who is yielded to the Holy Spirit has. 
    I have never owned a Rebel Flag (not even a toy).  Most people I see displaying that flag  are trailer-trash rednecks whose only way of bringing themselves up in this world is by bringing everyone else down.   The war between the states ended over one hundred and fifty years ago and the south lost.  The southern slogan is "the south shall rise again" but I certainly don't think reverting back to plantations, cotton fields and slavery, is much of a come-up pence.  The South cannot fully recover and live up to our potential on the backs of the minorities. 
    Oh there are plenty of good descent people that want everyone to believe that the Stars and Bars is just a piece of cloth and only represents Sothern Pride and in no way represents 'White Pride" or southern traditions of slavery  and oppression.  That's a load of crap.  The confederate flag represents more than the fierce and stubborn independence of the southern spirit but a longing for what many perceive as the ole glory days of the gentle' southern way of life. 
    I have a flag which represents what I believe in and I fly in proudly at various and appropriate times in my yard at home.  I willingly offered up my life to defend what that flag represents and I believe whole heartedly in the ideals that flag represents.  That flag is the Stars and Strips of the United States of America.  I'm not a white American, just an American.  I'm not a Southern American but just an American. 
   If the South is every to rise again it needs to put behind us what those that flew Confederate flag
hoped to accomplish and strive to embody the ideals that our nations flag purport to represent.