While the Civil War itself would continue on a few more weeks, for all intents the southern slaveowner insurrection attempting to keep slavery in the United States was over. The Thirteenth Amendment had just gotten passed in Congress and the antebellum world the Confederacy struggled to continue would be no more.
So to all of the Lost Causers/White Supremacists/"Slavery Wasn't All Bad" Far Right apologists:
SUCK IT, LOSERS.
YOU GOT YOUR ASSES KICKED.
THE CONFEDERATE BATTLE FLAG SHOULD HAVE THE WORD "LOSERS" SEWN ONTO BOTH SIDES OF THE FLAG SO WE CAN MAKE IT HISTORICALLY ACCURATE.
WE PLEDGE ALLIEGANCE TO THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER, YOU SEDITIONIST FREAKS.
WE GOT THE RED WHITE AND BLUE ON THE MOON, DOUBLE SUCK IT YOU HATERS.
Seriously though, we need to make Appomattox Surrender Day a national holiday, during which we all point at anybody still gleeful about the Confederacy and laugh and laugh and laugh. It'll be like Guy Fawkes Day, but with more humiliating putdowns towards the segregationist assholes.
We need to keep remembering this day as Appomattox Surrender Day until the rest of the Dixiecrat/Far Right/Confederate Dead-Enders realize they LOST, THEY GOT THEIR ASSES KICKED...
This is just one step. And it's very symbolic: it doesn't change the fact that racism remains a troubling wound to the nation's soul.
But this step is a big one.
Getting South Carolina - the hotbed of secession since the days of John C. Calhoun, the source of discord and segregation for more than a century - to lower the Confederate Battle Flag is a BFD. The symbol of hating a federal government that insists on equality before the law and between all citizens, the symbol of a Lost Cause far too many want to keep fighting, a flag that flew in public as a sign that the hatred supporting that heritage was tolerated at the least... That symbol no longer flies. Racism no longer carries an official seal of approval.
As for that flagpole, I recommend flying the Moultrie Flag as it has historic value.
Now for the hard part: convincing more people to stop being haters over race, stopping the fear-mongering out there causing unjust division among Americans.
We just basically had a crazy week just now, from the Charleston shooting until today. And while there was tragedy, there was also inspiration, and reflection and awareness, and justice, and drive, and emotional cleansing, and hope, and above all love. Especially love, today, tonight, this weekend. It was a week to remember.
Hundreds gather out front, holding aloft their smartphones
so they can document the celebration.
Last week Wednesday night started us off with the tragic breaking news of the shooting at the Emanuel AME Charleston church. It sparked a round of angry calls across the nation, over the intent of the shooter, the signs of racism that surrounded the city and the state of South Carolina (and the Deep South) itself, and the horror of gun violence visited again on another sanctuary where should not imagine such a happening.
The Far Right, led by their political figures especially the Republican candidates for the 2016 Presidency, tried to avoid talking about the shooting altogether. Worse, some tried to claim that "nobody could tell what the shooter's intent was," even though survivors reported the shooter explained himself as he pulled the trigger. Having spent 40 years pushing a Southern Strategy of White Male resentment, Republicans suddenly realized the bill was coming due.
By Monday after the police interrogation went public - proving exactly what happened and why - and after more photos surfaced of the shooter reveling in displays of the Stars and Bars, calls to have the Confederate Battle Flag - the key symbol of the Lost Cause, the symbol of race hatred for 150 years - taken down from public buildings multiplied to the point where the South Carolina governor Nikki Haley had to go public herself, calling for legislation to take the damn thing down off of her state's public forums (in a mockery of law, the state made it mandatory that the Confederate flag remains flying at all costs: when the American flag was lowered in honor of the dead, it just made the contrast more stark and shameful). In other states like Alabama, they just quietly lowered the damn flag and looked away.
Much of the week ended up with a back-and-forth battle on the media channels and the Internet over the "heritage" of the flag, over the right of free speech vs. the actuality of hate speech that flag represented. It was becoming clear that everything that battle flag represented - Jim Crow, racial oppression, a section of our population obsessed with a violent and bloody past - was and still is in risk of imploding on itself (which is, you know, a good thing).
And then Thursday we get good news, with the Supreme Court ruling - and a strong one at that - affirming the core point of Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) was to provide affordable healthcare to most Americans. A lot of celebration about how this was a huge victory for Obama, a huge win for Americans needing that healthcare coverage.
(there was an image here but it had been removed so... working on a replacement image)
And then Friday, two things. The Supreme Court issued the key ruling on gay marriage - on marriage itself - as a self-evident right to all under the 14th Amendment. Twitter and social media exploded. Haters raged. Lovers danced. The United States officially became Pro-People.
In the midst of all this, our nation returned its attention to Charleston once more, as President Obama showed up to perform the eulogy for the fallen pastor Reverend Clementa Pinckney. In that moment, in that place, Obama offered the most stirring, most profoundspeech he's ever given. (link here to full speech)
He openly condemned the flying of the Confederate Battle Flag. He openly condemned the shameful rate of gun violence in our nation, harking back to the tragedies of Sandy Hook and so many other mass shootings. He openly condemned the fear-mongering and the hate poisoning the national forum.
And Obama spoke of love. Obama spoke of faith, and forgiveness, and family. Obama spoke of grace. Human, Christian Grace.
...Blinded by hatred, the alleged killer could not see the grace surrounding Reverend Pinckney and that Bible study group: the light of love that shone as they opened the church doors and invited a stranger to join in their prayer circle. The alleged killer could have never anticipated the way the families of the fallen would respond when they saw him in court: in the midst of unspeakable grief, with words of forgiveness. He couldn’t imagine that...
The alleged killer could not imagine how the city of Charleston, under the good and wise leadership of Mayor Riley - how the state of South Carolina, how the United States of America would respond: not merely with revulsion at his evil act, but with big-hearted generosity and, more importantly, with a thoughtful introspection and self-examination that we so rarely see in public life...
Blinded by hatred, he failed to comprehend what Reverend Pinckney so well understood: the power of God’s grace.
This whole week, I’ve been reflecting on this idea of grace.
The grace of the families who lost loved ones. The grace that Reverend Pinckney would preach about in his sermons. The grace described in one of my favorite hymnals, the one we all know: Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me... I once was lost, but now I’m found; was blind but now I see...
According to the Christian tradition, grace is not earned. Grace is not merited. It’s not something we deserve. Rather, grace is the free and benevolent favor of God as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings. Grace.
As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind. He has given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves. We may not have earned it, this grace, with our rancor and complacency, and short-sightedness and fear of each other... but we got it all the same. He gave it to us anyway. He’s once more given us grace. But it is up to us now to make the most of it, to receive it with gratitude, and to prove ourselves worthy of this gift.
And then Obama tried - bless him, but he was a bit off-key - to sing Amazing Grace, the Christian hymn above all other hymnals.
The speech, the presence, the words and the faith: all inspiring. Closing out a day of grace and good-will. We're still fighting - the haters are still railing against the tide of history and that long arc towards justice - but now there's a sense of real hope, that we're growing wiser, that we're seeing the problems for real this time, that there's something to fight FOR and a future worth keeping our promises.
This was a crazy week. But even with the pain of loss it was a good crazy.
In one of the worst mass shootings in the state's history, a gunman opened fire during Wednesday night services at Emanuel AME Church, one of Charleston's oldest black churches in downtown Charleston.
Eight people died at the church, and a ninth person died later at MUSC hospital, Charleston Police Chief Gregory Mullen said during a news conference just before 1 a.m. Thursday. The number of injured people and their conditions were not known.
Charleston police chief Gregory Mullen said he will investigate the shooting as a hate crime...
Turns out it is a hate crime. The shooter - whom I shall not name - intentionally walked into the historic Black church (he hails from Columbia, which is a good distance from Charleston, so he went out of his way here), intentionally sat in on a prayer session, intentionally pulled out a gun, intentionally shot most of the people present, intentionally reloaded, intentionally told the surviving witnesses "I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go," and intentionally fled so he could get safely captured by police in another state.
The shooter - no, the terrorist - chose a church with vast history: formed by one of the earliest anti-slavery leaders, Denmark Vesey. A free Black who formed the first Black church south of the Mason-Dixon, he was accused in 1822 of fomenting a slave revolt and executed on secret evidence, and after his hanging his church was destroyed. His sons eventually rebuilt the church after the Civil War, where it became the center of African-American culture and politics in the shadow of Jim Crow and in the light of the Civil Rights movement. The terrorist just happened to select out of the hundreds of churches in South Carolina to target, and he targeted the one with the deepest racial meaning.
This is just another day in America, isn't it?
It's just another day where Blacks get shot at, just like all the other days from Sanford and Cleveland and Ferguson and Baltimore and a hundred other cities. It doesn't matter if I or anybody else rail about this over the years - this I wrote last year for God's sake - nobody's gonna do a goddamn thing about it, are they?
It's just another day where we have a gun massacre in our communities, regardless of it being a school or a church or a movie theater or a college campus. It's just another day where the rights of the gun-fetishists under the Second Amendment to open-carry weapons that can kill anybody they don't like take priority over the rights of the vast majority of Americans who don't own guns yet try to peaceably assemble as due their rights under the First Amendment.
We have a problem with guns. It isn’t going away. You can dig through the twitter streams and comment threads as I have, but you already know what you’ll find. For too many Americans, the solution to our gun problem is obvious: the answer to a bad shooter in church are good ones. If only those at prayer had been packing, Dylann Roof wouldn’t have been able to kill more than three or four before taking a couple of hundred grains of lead to the throat in return fire. If only…
The ammosexual defense of their kink is predictable and almost certainly incorrigible. Driven (and heavily armed) that’s a view that’s managed to hold political sway over the mushy majority for whom the notion the the liberty of the gun-sniffing few outweighs the freedom of the rest of us to assemble, travel, speak without fear of suppressing fire. What drives that is, at least in part, the normalization of gun fetishization. Which is what you see above. And is what must be shamed out of the public square...
We should speak of it as an assault on the idea of a political commonwealth, which is what it was. And we should speak of it as one more example of all of these, another link in a bloody chain of events that reaches all the way back to African wharves and Southern docks. It is not an isolated incident, not if you consider history as something alive that can live and breathe and bleed. We should speak of all these things. What happened in that church was a lot of things, but unspeakable is not one of them.
Not to think about these things is to betray the dead. Not to speak of these things is to dishonor them. Let Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina, look out her window at the flag of treason that is flown proudly at her state capitol and think about these things, and speak of them, before she pronounces herself so puzzled at how something like this could happen in South Carolina, the home office of American sedition...
It's just another day, isn't it, out of the 200-plus years of our nation's history where racism and violence are part of the pride and arrogance of the haters who insist on flying a flag of treason and war over our state capitols. In South Carolina, they've lowered the official state flag to half-mast, they've lowered the national flag - our Stars and Stripes - to half-mast, and they're still flying that goddamn Stars and Bars battle flag at full-mast.
The Confederate flag’s defenders often claim it represents “heritage not hate.” I agree—the heritage of White Supremacy was not so much birthed by hate as by the impulse toward plunder. Dylann Roof plundered nine different bodies last night, plundered nine different families of an original member, plundered nine different communities of a singular member. An entire people are poorer for his action. The flag that Roof embraced, which many South Carolinians embrace, does not stand in opposition this act—it endorses it. That the Confederate flag is the symbol of of white supremacists is evidenced by the very words of those who birthed it...
...Surely the flag’s defenders will proffer other, muddier, interpretations which allow them the luxury of looking away. In this way they honor their ancestors. Cowardice, too, is heritage. When white supremacist John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln 150 years ago, Booth’s fellow travelers did all they could to disassociate themselves. “Our disgust for the dastardly wretch can scarcely be uttered,” fumed a former governor of South Carolina, the state where secession began. Robert E. Lee’s armies took special care to enslave free blacks during their Northern campaign. But Lee claimed the assassination of the Great Emancipator was “deplorable.” Jefferson Davis believed that “it could not be regarded otherwise than as a great misfortune to the South,” and angrily denied rumors that he had greeted the news with exultation...
Moral cowardice requires choice and action. It demands that its adherents repeatedly look away, that they favor the fanciful over the plain, myth over history, the dream over the real. Here is another choice.
Take down the flag. Take it down now.
Goddamn us, as a nation. We are led by cowards and fear-mongers who would profit from racism by making the rest of us suffer for their rage and greed and pride.
To the leaders of Florida, if that Confederate Battleflag of Treason and Race Hatred is flying over our buildings in Tallahassee or anywhere, TAKE THOSE DAMN FLAGS DOWN NOW. To the southern states from Texas to Virginia, if any of you are flying that damn flag, SHAME ON YOU AND TAKE IT DOWN.
Back to Pierce for his closing (but not final, because Goddamn us this is going to keep happening until we face these demons of fear and wrath) thoughts:
...There is a timidity that the country can no longer afford. This was not an unthinkable act. A man may have had a rat's nest for a mind, but it was well thought out. It was a cool, considered crime, as well planned as any bank robbery or any computer fraud. If people do not want to speak of it, or think about it, it's because they do not want to follow the story where it inevitably leads. It's because they do not want to follow this crime all the way back to the mother of all American crimes, the one that Denmark Vesey gave his life to avenge. What happened on Wednesday night was a lot of things. A massacre was only one of them.
On this day in history 150 years ago, April 9 1865 in the United States, we were finishing off a bloody war between the states.
The southern slave states that rose up in rebellion in 1860 had pretty much gotten their asses kicked. It took four years of hundreds of thousands of corpses and amputated wounded, but the Confederacy was down to a few straggled divisions. Their best commander, Robert E. Lee, was doing his best to get his army back out into a battlefield, but was trapped at a place called Appomattox Court House and had almost no supplies or soldiers to continue on. Faced with the reality fighting was no longer an option, Lee answered his opponent General U.S. Grant's letters for a full surrender. By that afternoon of April 9, Lee signed formal papers on the terms of surrender: by all accounts more generous terms given by the winning army, as Grant was following Lincoln's instructions to be "gracious" in victory.
Lee's surrender of the Virginian army under his direct command wasn't the actual full-out end of the Civil War, as there were still other (some larger) Confederate armies on the battlefields in North Carolina and the West. But Lee was the top general of the southern armies, and the political leadership of the Confederacy was pretty much fleeing for their lives leaving Lee in charge: when he fell, the rest pretty much had nothing else to do but surrender as well.
This week provides an occasion for the U.S. government to get real about history, as April 9 is the 150th anniversary of the Union’s victory in the Civil War. The generous terms of Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House foreshadowed a multitude of real and symbolic compromises that the winners of the war would make with secessionists, slavery supporters, and each other to piece the country back together. It’s as appropriate an occasion as the Selma anniversary to reflect on the country’s struggle to improve itself. And to mark the occasion, the federal government should make two modest changes: It should make April 9 a federal holiday; and it should commit to disavowing or renaming monuments to the Confederacy, and its leaders, that receive direct federal support.
We really do need this because we've got entire generations of Americans who seem to forget that the Confederate South LOST the war, that the South got its COLLECTIVE ASS kicked from the Mississippi to the Potomac, that the Southern argument for the primacy of slavery and the perpetuation of race hatred were the arguments of LOSERS and fools.
I'm not mincing word here. The whole "Lost Cause" mentality that has driven the likes of the KKK and 100-plus years of Jim Crow segregation and an additional 50-plus years of far right wingnuttery has poisoned our national landscape. We've got idiots in power and idiots in the streets running around acting and talking like the ideas of Jeff Davis and Edmund Pettus and other pro-slavery firebrands meant something.
The real end of the Civil War hasn't happened yet. We're still fighting the same ignorant haters as before, the same elitist upper-class barons who'd love to bring back cheap labor to the point of slavery itself and are eager to wipe out every civil liberty gain this nation's achieved since 1865. Back to Beutler:
People of good faith can argue over whether these kinds of symbolic concessions (as opposed to the concrete ones, which consigned emancipated slaves to a century of sanctioned depredations) were wise or necessary means to the end of preserving the Union. Some of them weren't concessions at all, so much as insufficient commitment on the part of Northerners to the livelihood of blacks in the South. "[A]s Northern Republican Party became more conservative," historian Eric Foner wrote recently, "Reconstruction came to be seen as a misguided attempt to uplift the lower classes of society." But 150 years on, we know that subjugation is a moral obscenity, and that there's no valid modern argument for spitshining the Confederacy.
One way to end the fighting is the reminder, the historical FACT that Appomattox happened, that the South LOST, that the Lost Cause itself is a bullsh-t ideology.
Dear Southern Conservative Far Right WingNuts Who Want to Take the United States Back to 1850: YOU LOST. YOU GOT YOUR ASSES KICKED. YOU SEE THAT AMERICAN FLAG, THE STARS AND STRIPES? GUESS WHAT! WINNERS WAVE THAT FLAG. WE PLANTED IT ON THE MOON, FOR GOD'S SAKE. WE BEAT THE NAZIS UNDER THAT FLAG. WE BEAT THE COMMIES WAVING THAT FLAG. WE'RE AMERICANS GODDAMMIT SO STOP IT WITH YOUR WHINY "OH BUT WE WANTS TO HATE TEH BLACKS" BULLSH-T. /rage
Appomattox Surrender Day. The day when every Confederate flag waver ought to hide in shame like the fools they are.
(Granted, this isn't as eloquent as Beutler makes it, but my points are valid).
