THERE’S a sweet Southern woman, but we repeat ourselves, who once explained why she wouldn’t have a Confederate flag at her home. Not waving above her lawn, not on her vehicle, not on a child’s school binder.
She explained:
The flag hasn’t hurt anybody. It’s just fabric and dye. But so is a blue bath towel. And if a blue bath towel offended half my friends, some of my colleagues, several in my neighborhood, not to mention strangers who might pass by, why would I fly it? To intentionally offend somebody?
We remember an old Paul Greenberg column from years back. He said he felt cheated after the skinheads began flying the Confederate flag. Because it wasn’t theirs. But, he added, he would in no way join with them, either.
The prophet from Pine Bluff explained further: “I thought about putting up the Confederate battle flag on Jan. 19, Robert E. Lee’s birthday. But it was only a fleeting thought. It would be misunderstood. To quote Donna Britt, a newspaper columnist, ‘For many African Americans, just seeing the battle flag—on a T-shirt or coffee mug—is a stab to the heart.’ I couldn’t be a party to that.
“Besides, I’m a Lincoln man. I love the South—but not slavery or secession, God forbid. Tear the United States apart? Never! Why, I even took an oath once to defend its Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
These are two examples of what it means to be a lady or a gentleman. The two can be learned. But it helps if you’re born with a heapin’ helping of consideration for others.
What a coincidence: Arkansas’ state flag, and the Confederacy, are back in the papers again. You’d never know it before this legislative session, but one of the stars on Arkansas’ flag supposedly “represents” the Confederacy. That designation is in the law-books. And it took state Rep. Charles Blake to point that out a few weeks ago.
He proposed a bill that would take that designation away and give it to native American tribes. After his bill was blocked, he shuffled some papers around, and some stars, and now has another bill in the Ledge which would do just about as much. It wouldn’t require any new flags, only a change of a few lines in Arkansas law, to acknowledge Indian tribes—and to unacknowledge the old unlamented Confederacy.
Rep. Blake’s first bill couldn’t get out of committee, and couldn’t get out by a long shot. It was tabled.
His latest effort might show that the Legislature is warming up to the idea. Very. Slowly.
Another state rep trotted out a motion to block the most recent bill in committee, but that motion failed 4-4. Can we call that progress?
The governor says HB1736 isn’t dead, and he supports the idea. This is a Southern, Republican, conservative governor whose great-grandfather was a colonel in the Confederate States of America, not the United States of America. But Asa Hutchinson is also a gentleman, and we suspicion he wouldn’t fly a blue bath towel if he thought it would upset his neighbors.
It’s funny, in a way, to read some of the comments on social media about this little tempest. It seems some folks are getting their talking points from Ann Coulter, who’s never come across as a lady. They say the Democrats had years, decades, to make this change, and now that Republicans have control of Arkansas government, suddenly this has become a thing.
Perhaps. But we remember something Walker Percy said, that writer of The Moviegoer, religious essayist and true Southern gentleman. He once chided folks for playing that game: “The South, on the other hand, has always managed to comfort itself by pointing to the hypocrisy of the North—not realizing that it is a sorry game in which the highest score is a tie: ‘Look, they’re as bad as we are!’”
This state has come a long way since 1957. Hell, this state has come a long way since 2007. We the People can take another step with HB1736.
It’s not a matter of being impolitic.
Just impolite.