Today is April Fool’s Day. Perhaps by coincidence, it is also the first day of “Confederate Heritage Month” in Mississippi, so this morning when I saw my neighbor, Curtis, who is black, I flipped him the keys to my storage shed.
“Get the rake out of the shed and clean up the yard,” I said. “When you’re finished, wash the truck, weed the flower beds and put a fresh coat of paint on the fence. It would be a nice touch if you could sing some of those old Negro Spirituals you people are so fond of as you happily perform these tasks.”
… The doctor says my broken nose will not require surgery.
It pains me, quite literally in this instance, to discover there are some Mississippians who are not taking Confederate Heritage Month in the spirit in which Gov. Phil Bryant intended.
To be fair, maybe people like Curtis simply have not read the proclamation from the Governor, who apparently thinks “Gone With the Wind” is a documentary.
In his proclamation, issued appropriately enough during Black History Month in February, Bryant observed that it is “important for all Americans to reflect upon our nation’s past.” By that logic, I am surprised that we do not have such equally festive celebrations as “Japanese-American Internment Month” or “Native American Trail of Tears Month.”
The proclamation went on to say that during Confederate Heritage Month we all must “earnestly strive to understand (i.e., rationalize, minimize, sanitize) our heritage and the opportunities which lie before us.”
I suspect people such as my violence-prone neighbor simply haven’t carefully reflected on all of those “opportunities” created by the Confederacy and its enduring legacy.
That’s too bad because, from the Governor’s point of view, there are many reasons we should all pay homage to those wonderful Confederates.
For starters, there has never been a group of people more committed to idea of Freedom than our long-departed men in gray and their hoop-skirted Scarlett O’Haras back at Tara.
When it comes to Freedom, these people were practically hoarders. They loved Freedom so much that they were willing to lay down their lives — or better yet, the lives of their easily-deluded slave-less white neighbors — so that they could keep Freedom all to their lily-white selves.
Today, there are various organizations — Sons of the Confederacy, Daughters of the Confederacy, Third Cousins Once Removed of the Confederacy, etc. — which proudly claim the lineage of those ancient Rebels. Yet the true heirs to the Confederacy are all among us who still embrace the Confederate conviction that there is a finite supply of Freedom.
That means we cannot go around dispensing Freedom, willy-nilly, to dubious groups such as blacks, gays, non-Christians, socialists, climate scientists and NASCAR-haters.
Being a Christian people, we don’t mind occasionally doling out Freedom — in small, easily-digestible increments — when people prove they can be trusted with it, primarily by agreeing that there is a time-honored natural order of things that should not be challenged.
Even then, we recognize a slippery slope. Give somebody a little Freedom and he gets all greedy and wants even more Freedom and, yes, before you know it he will want some of OUR Freedom. You see the danger, I am sure.
Now, some folks who support Confederate Heritage Month say this has nothing to do with slavery. According to the 1860 U.S. Census, about half of the white households in Mississippi did not own even a single slave at the outbreak of the Civil War, which we know began when the Northern Aggressors hurled a federal fort at the canon balls of the peace-loving Confederates of Charleston, South Carolina.
The argument is that these people could not have been fighting to preserve slavery because they didn’t even own slaves. That explanation has evolved. Now the narrative is, “Hey, not only did they not own slaves, they didn’t even LIKE slavery, but, hey, what are you gonna do? Somebody chunks a fort at you. You can’t just sit there and take it.”
Of all the dubious defenses of Confederate Memorial Day, this one crumbles most easily under the weight of logic.
For example, I have never owned a yacht, but that does not make me yacht-neutral and it certainly doesn’t make me a yacht-hater. On the contrary, I think I would very much enjoying owning a yacht. If I could convince you to fight so that I might have a yacht, well, here, lemme hold your hat.
Fat chance of that. I can’t even convince Curtis to do my yard work.
Despite our Governor’s best efforts, Mississippians like Curtis appear to have no respect at all for our Confederate Heritage.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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