Upside down morality plunges America into anarchy
Using Confederate Flag as a beach towel apparently is more offensive and upsetting to some than the actual violence and destruction of White-owned businesses, vehicles and individuals in our upside down world of skewered morality
By Ray Hanania
Last week, a bunch of the bully protestors got upset when a beachgoer in Evanston used a towel with the image of the flag of the Confederate States.
You know the Confederate Flag. It was used more than 150 years ago as the symbol of a bunch of American states that supported racism and slavery, and who then started the civil war.
Since then, the “Confederate Flag” has been little more than an icon of a long-ago age. That happens a lot. Images ranging from good to bad exist in our society. But of course, the line of acceptability changes. What was once passively accepted before suddenly becomes a symbol of hate.
Well, not for everyone, of course.
The Black Lives Matter protestors may get upset when they see a half naked lady lying on a confederate flag pattern towel on an exclusive North Suburban beachfront.
But they don’t seem to care much at the symbols of real destruction, racism and hate, like when members of their own protests loot a store, or even burn it down.
In April I interviewed two families whose stores were looted. One was looted twice. The owners and members of the family cried as they watched the looters kick in the doors and windows and walk out casually with boxes of toilet paper, booze, food, snacks and more. Watching nearby were uniformed members of the Chicago police who were bullied into only confronting “real threats” to life.
Because in the mantra of the BLM extremists – people who have taken a just cause of fighting for Black Lives and turned it into a destructive movement of reverse racism and hate – the destruction of a family’s livelihood isn;’t comparable to the taking of a life of a former felon by a police officer in Minneapolis.
So, the logic goes, if you protest the killing of a person, you can do anything up to the line of matching the crime you are protesting. Looting, arson and even physical violence mean nothing as long as someone doesn’t lose their life.
Hogwash!
Some of the BLM protestors spoke out against the looters and arsonists, because those looters and arsonists who were walking among the protestors when they decided to detour and destroy a family’s livelihood were an embarrassment, I guess.
They didn’t denounce them as forcefully as they denounced everything else, like a beachgoer at Evanston’s Lighthouse beach who decided to remove the towel when a few protestors started to reason with them rather than beat them silly with bats or make threatening verbal assaults as has been done elsewhere.
What happened to a person’s right to have an opinion? I don’t agree with displaying the Confederate Flag, but someone who feels it represents a Southern heritage or culture that might be devoid of the racism that plague not only the South but the North, too, should be able to display that flag. They certainly have a right to view that flag in their own context, which often has nothing to do with racism.
Yes, slavery wasn’t just something the Confederate States embraced. It was embraced throughout America. It was also embraced by African countries and by tribes. Many African slaves were sold to slavers by other African tribes. But that was 150 years ago, so it’s easy to forget or brush it all aside.
You can use the Nazi symbol and make a counter argument, of course, but I would rather know who the Nazis are living among us. So, if they want to spew their hatred, let them do it. It’s better to have it in the open than in the excesses of the shadows.
But those are easy issues to decide, not supporting the Nazi swastika or even the now Confederate Flag, which is a part of America’s history. Let’s not even try to compare the two because they are far different.
More difficult are things like Twitter deciding what is or what isn’t acceptable. Some unknown “Big Brother” at the behemoth Twitter Corporation decides that they think an opinion or observation oon their social media is “wrong,” and they decide to remove it.
Was it wrong? Or was it just different from what they believe. No one elected Twitter to be the guardian or right and wrong, did they? Was their an election? Why have an election? Some unknown person can just decide what is right and what is wrong for the rest of us.
We’re all morons, the public at large. We need to have some invisible, nameless Big Brother telling us what is right and what is wrong. Let’s scrub the world of everything that is wrong, or that someone feels is wrong to them but maybe not wrong to you.
We can’t use violence as a measure because the terrorism we experience is a reflection of the terrorism we sow. My Lai in Vietnam was an act of terrorism. People were punished. But the point is violence isn’t only the result of the “bad guys” or the “bad symbols” or the “bad policy.”
Someone doesn’t like Christopher Columbus so they just go out and destroy the statue.
It’s called anarchy. It’s called denying our history. It’s called hypocrisy.
(Originally published August 5, 2020 in the Southwest News Newspaper Group including in The Regional News, the Palos Reporter, the Southwest News-Herald, and the Des Plaines Valley news.)
Hanania also writes about Middle East issues for the Arab News, and The Arab Daily News criticizing government policies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hanania was named "Best Ethnic American Columnist" by the New America Media in November 2007, and is the 2009 recipient of the SPJ National Sigma Delta Chi Award for column writing.
Email Ray Hanania at rghanania@gmail.com.
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