Why the reverence in the South for the Confederate flag, especially when it’s your average good ol’ boy doing the revering? Get over it, Bubba. Don’t you know that at slavery’s peak only 3 percent of the population owned almost all of the slaves? And the guys who owned all those slaves were not like us — they’da called us “poor white trash.” What, do you think you’re gonna be Rhett Butler in the big white mansion? Not likely. Three percent is not a very big number, and chances are good it did not include any of our ancestors.
Nope, we’d be scuffling around trying to get “massa” to pay us for work that “massa” could get done by slaves, for free. Or maybe he’d let us serve in his army, to defend the system that keeps us down as a result of all the work being done by millions of enslaved humans.
That flag represents a war where a lot of mostly poor people fought and died for a system that disregarded them. Reverence for a flag that memorializes a war fought by poor people in defense of the bondage and brutalization of even worse-off people by rich people is nuts.
Jim Gilmore, Boise
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