Stars And Bars; A Relic Of An Unsavory Past...

I've never appreciated the Confederate Battle Flag, the Stars and Bars.  Those who fly it have always seemed to me to be self-identifying with the losing side of a moral war.  Is it the most pressing concern of our time?  Not by a long shot.  But I'll mention it briefly.

I suppose that there are some families - maybe even many - who fought valiantly on the side of the South in the Civil War, and who didn't entirely buy into the foundational racism on which the Confederate States of America was built.  Just as I am sure there are German families who weren't completely bought into the ideals of Nazism, Hutus who didn't support the Rwandan genocide of Tutsis.

And I suppose that there are some individuals - maybe even many - who fly the Stars and Bars in memory of a bygone time when life was sweet, simple and slow.  Perhaps they fly it in defiance of an ever encroaching federal power.  Perhaps they fly it as an affirmation of their value of individual and states' rights.  But the fact remains that it is also, and primarily, a symbol of man's inhumanity to man; of his willingness to enslave his brother and to torment his sister.

It can be argued that, although perhaps not as close to the roots of some, there are other symbols of defiance that lack the racist and oppressive overtones of the Stars and Bars.  There is the Navy Jack, the Gadsden Flag, the Liberty Bell, the Texas state flag, the Texas Independence Flag, the eagle, the lion, the star, or the anarchist's "A".

As such, I don't much care if someone flies the Confederate Battle Flag, wears it, or makes art of it.  And I don't have a problem with Governor Haley taking it off the South Carolina capitol grounds.

If one is going to keep or display it, he just needs to be sure of the context in which he presents it, and the feelings it may evoke in others.

That's not censorship.  That's just being neighborly.  

The Leftist's Ego-Centered Universe...

While professing concern and solidarity with the 'common man,' leftists really see the world only in terms of self.  How must the world see me?  What do I think about this or that?  What do I see when I look at the world?

Mrs. Obama recently visited a school in Great Britain.  In the course of her remarks she told the girls she was addressing that when she looked at them she saw herself....  Similarly, when President Obama spoke of Trayvon Martin he did not identify him as someone else's loved one.  Instead he asserted that Mr. Martin could have been his own son.  A part of himself.

What does that mean?  When I look at you, I don't see you as an individual worthy of respect by virtue of your being.  When I look at you, I don't see independent wills and minds.  When I look at you, I don't see sovereign souls.  Rather, when I look at you, I see creatures in my own image.  When I look at you, I see what I imagine I am.  Indeed, I am your creator and you exist because I will it.  

Look at the leftist social engineers who believe that people will behave because they are told to behave.  Farmers will farm because they are told to farm.  Steel workers will make steel because they are told to make steel.  Soldiers will fight because they are told to fight.  And all will care for all because they are told to care.  Like cattle, like productive assets, like automatons people are expected to obey the social engineers; their masters.  And the hubris does not stop there.

Central planners in the old Soviet Union dictated when to plant and when to harvest independent of the weather, believing that commanding it would make it so.  They dictated how much coal to mine and how much steel to produce independent of the capacity of men or machines, believing that commanding it would make it so.  The result was famine and industrial disaster.  And the social engineers never took responsibility, never acknowledged the flaws in their reasoning.  Rather, they blamed 'wreckers' and 'spies' for problems.  

Today, President Obama believes that because he wishes Iran not to have a nuclear weapon they will not have one; because he wishes government assistance to lead to prosperity poor people will become wealthy by using food stamps; because he wishes illegal immigrants to be productive members of society they will be.  His belief denies the free will of mankind and the laws of nature.  Further, it ignores millenia of historical documentation of human nature.

Further, President Obama speaks in the first person and is so completely self-referential in his rhetoric that it becomes difficult to imagine that he did not cast the winning vote for the Affordable Care Act, did not help every illegal immigrant graduate from college, and did not physically pull the trigger killing Osama Bin Laden.  

Because the leftist is without God, he must self-identify as the supreme being in the universe.  While physiologically similar to other hominids scraping and groveling in the common biosphere, the leftist is, by some accident of evolution, intellectually superior and has a duty - it is unclear from whence this duty devolves, as morality and moral imperative are murky concepts - to coordinate and manage the affairs, the relationships, the existence of all lower life forms, all the while he must ensure that his own comfort is not compromised, but rather enhanced.

Because the leftist is the center of his own universe.