Amen

A triumph for all those who believe in human rights, for all those who believe in justice and fair play and for all those who believe in the truth of history the Confederate flag, a vicious symbol of hate and the perpetuation of a system that kept people of color in chains, WILL be taken down from the S. Carolina state house steps.

Slavery, Jim Crow, cross burnings and hangings of poor blacks are that flag's legacy and the heritage white racists love to brag about so much.  If the south had been Civil War victorious, it would have continued its carnage against persons of color and it would have delayed if not eradicated our Founders’ promise of Constitutional equal rights for ALL men.  The continuation of a system and the flag it represents that deemed a human being 3/5ths of a person would not have ended.  The odiousness of that symbol lies in the outer limits of linguistic description.

The Republican S. Carolina state House member, Jenny Horne, pleading on the state house floor for the Confederate flag's removal is the righteous among our nation.  She deserves the Medal of Freedom because her tears and words eloquently delivered on that floor put the final nail in a Confederate flag draped coffin soaked in the blood of innocents bearing the strange fruit hanging from those Poplar trees. She scored the win and delivered the final blow to that ugly flag under which the murdered body of a very good man, Reverend/Representative Climenta Pinckney, ironically rode.   If you have not heard Jennie Horne's passionate plea I urge you to listen to it.

A momentous achievement happened today, the Confederate flag, symbol of hate, came down from the S. Carolina state house steps.  Truthfully, though, other symbols of our nation's original sin live on in other forms against the minority group de jour across this nation.  It lives on in the form of voter ID laws, anti-immigrant hostility and other forms of discrimination to keep those persons of color out of the voting booth and not only in the south.

Imagine, it took 300 years and many violent actions to secure rights for a people who had no rights but should have had them simply by their birth here.  I believe in luck.  One must be lucky in life to be born into the right circumstances, into the right group at the right time. Being born poor and black in the south and in many places of this nation, was and continues to be a stroke of bad luck that must be overcome.

Those of us who care about justice and fair play fight on, taking new fights to new venues of injustice to force our nation to live up to our declared national promise:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

 

To that I say Amen!