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Speaking as a Southerner, it's the petty vindictiveness of (literally, this time) beating a dead horse. The Confederacy has been dead a long time. Jim Crow has been dead far longer than the average black American has been alive. Banning rednecks from flying the rebel flag at Talladega and cooking up a noose hoax to try and shame the audience into submission (something I felt actual feelings about; it's irrational but it was infuriating) isn't going to do a damn thing to improve things for black Americans. At some point you're going to have to quit blaming those pesky Confederates and either come up with a solution or admit that you don't have one, because it's not our fault that black kids in Baltimore can't read.
As I like to remind my northern relatives (My parents met in the military so half is from Alabama and the other from Michigan.), once they got a taste of Coleman Young (first black mayor of Detroit, born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama) they voted for George Wallace in '72 (and George Wallace came home with a GM plant that my grandfather worked for, completely turning around the economic fortunes of my family; no shit they liked George Wallace.). Don't pretend that you're innocent and that your statues aren't next. You're not and they very much are next. We're in the same boat here.
As for the good old days, I'd settle for the pre-2010s racial truce.
It's definitely not. And I agree both on the point that petty vindictiveness is petty, and that the left wants to go much further than banning the confederate flag. But I also can't help but wonder why one wants to associate with the confederate flag at all? I mean, they also (probably?) want to ban the Nazi flag, but nobody has any feelings about that, as far as I know. To me - and I'm not leftist at all - confederates were very much the bad guys, especially the ones that were in control at the time of the war (which was like less than 1% of the population, who owned pretty much everything, including vast majority of the slaves, as far as I read). Yes, beating the dead horse is silly, but why that horse is there to be beaten at all? Why it's the thing at all? That part it's not clear to me. I realize it's being used by the left to achieve their eternal purpose - power over everything - and that's wrong. But I also want to understand why Confederate thing is alive at all to be used too.
I'd do the same, but I don't think there's a way to unsail that ship... Recovering from all the "uniting the nation" and "healing the differences" of the Obama era and the following is going to take a long time, especially when half of the country wants exactly the opposite - they feel like they're winning so they want to push further and further. Why have a truce if we're about to sack their capital and pillage their homes?
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