Anecdotal evidence is usually pretty lousy evidence, and I don’t offer the following for anything more than what it is worth, which you can decide. I went into Phoenixville the other day to get some ice cream with my son. After we got our cones, we were walking through a nearby alley when we came across two rough-looking men in their late 20’s who were loading something or other into their flatbed truck. The first thing I noticed was one of the men’s shirts. It read: “Do I look like a fucking people person?”
He actually looked like someone who engages in group rape and weekend motorcycle trips. Still, the shirt made me chuckle a little.
When we had proceeded a little further down the alley, a noise made me turn around, and it was then that I noticed the Confederate Flag vanity plate on the front of their truck.
I had noticed previously that the back of the truck had a Pennsylvania plate, so I doubt these guys were from South Carolina. The flag symbol on the truck had the same basic message as the shirt on the man’s back, which was basically to tell anyone who might encounter them that they revel in being assholes.
I don’t know if they want everyone to think they are racists. I do know that they want everyone to think they are pricks. Not caring that they might come off as racists is just a part of being sure that they come off as pricks.
I get that some people want to be bad boys. They want to be anti-social. They enjoy intimidating people and acting real tough.
These guys were bigger, stronger, and younger than me, and probably more willing to fight, too, but I wasn’t remotely scared of them. They weren’t about to mess with a white middle age dad out walking with his five-year old son eating ice cream cones. They probably weren’t going to mess with anybody.
But they were driving a truck around in the North with Confederate plates, which is something I consider disloyal. I had a brief impulse to deface their truck. I wanted to tell them to get in the vehicle and drive the fuck south if they wanted to disrespect the Union.
Of course, I didn’t. I’m past my prime, and I was with my son, and I was stone cold sober.
But, yeah, their stupid vanity plates offended me. They offended me.
I can get all abstract about it and be offended for other people who might see those plates, too. I know that symbol can strike fear into black people, and for very good reason. But I don’t even need to be abstract about it to take offense. I don’t want people flying that flag in the North. Any northerner who flies that flag is a jackass at a minimum. Maybe it means you’re proud of your heritage to some people down South. People say that anyway. But, up here, it doesn’t mean that at all, ever.
Up here, it reads to me as “I don’t like black people.”
And, as I’ve already said, if that’s not precisely what you mean, it’s still obvious that you don’t give a rat’s ass if people think that’s what you mean. Either way, you’re an anti-social asshole.
And that’s your right. You have the right to behave that way and to project that image. Maybe you get off on it.
But people fly that flag for a lot of reasons beside being proud of being Southern. And none of them are good.
The Southern heritage bullshit is just a more gentrified way of being a prick.
I love to ask any of these folks, what “heritage” are they honoring. What did they like the most about the Confederacy?
I’m betting the majority don’t know shit about the “heritage” of the Confederacy.
Slavery. And the part they like best was the part about taking any black woman they wanted. That’s why they always talk about black men raping white women. Because that’s what they would do. I think the psychologists call it displacement or something like that.
If I, being a white man, talk with them long enough, they always get to the sex.
You win your bet. The “War of Northern Aggression” bullshit still has traction. Few know when they say that it wasn’t about slavery they are telling a half-truth. Slavery under Lincoln was not in jeopardy. What was the issue was the extension of slavery to to the Mountain and Pacific Northwest. Prohibition of slavery there meant that it would never be possible for the South to avoid Congress ending slavery. Southern politician thought that the Confederacy could extend itself southward into Latin America and preserve slavery in perpetuity. There is not one in a hundred white Southerners who understand that politics and not one in a thousand who know who Edmund Ruffin, one of the biggest secession propagandists, was. A Virginian, Ruffin at age 70 some odd committed suicide on the news of Appomattox.
The Confederate flag was brought out of mothballs in 1952 when Clarendon County Schools first was sued; that suit was later rolled into Brown v. Board of Education. The Governor in 1952 was FDR’s Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes.
Just like “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance (1954) and “In God We Trust” as motto (the earlier one was “E Pluribus Unum”, the “heritage” of the Confederate flag dates to the beginning of the effects of the civil rights movement (always linked in some way by segregationists with “communism”, “godless communism”). And the Southern traitors became the biggest flagwavers in the Cold War.
The “heritage” of which they speak is the plantation economic model that was built on and required slavery with a justification that depended on a white supremacist worldview. The heritage is also the treason they committed to protect their economic model.
At some point, people of good will in SC and around the country will just have to go and tear down that flag. Wouldn’t it be great if Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama led the protest? Can you even imagine?
No, neither can I. And if our calculating politicians can’t even bring themselves to do the deed… Why should we? WE… should. Who will stand with the martyrs of Charleston and do it? Anyone? No. No one will.
Let the flag fly… let it remind us all of our cowardice and our complicity. Let it be our curse.
“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Watch news out of Columbia tomorrow. There is at least a “Take it down” rally going to happen.
This is moving from mourning to interesting.
I hope you are right. I will cheer the moment and, for once, be proud of my fellow citizens.
I fucking hate the flag of southron treason. It’s invariably a signal that the person flying it is both an absolute moron and an absolute asshole, plus packing something large with many bullets.
Just like swastikas.
Exactly like swastikas. But instead of genocide (like for example Wounded Knee), it symbolizes a system of privatized capitalistic gulags very much like Solzhenitsyn describes but hot instead of cold.
I probably told you that I did my graduate work at UNC-CH. The flag of treason was one reason why I left with a feeling of relief to return to the Midwest. I am certainly not saying that the Midwest is free of assholes, many of whom fly the flag of treason. But in NC, more did. Of course, NC is not as bad as SC or AL or MS or GA. How any person not from the area can stand to live there with that “south shall rise agin” crap as a pervasive part of the culture is beyond me.
My daughter lives in Alabama. Remember when Howard Dean referred to pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals and a whole bunch of people started protesting that they don’t have confederate flag decals in the South? I had asked my daughter about that and she said, “No, they don’t have decals. Usually the dealer paints it on.” BTW, my daughter is socialist. She lives their because her husband was born and raised there. And for the weather. Sorry, but I thought I had to apologize for her living there by choice.
Not only just like the swastika, but also like the Viet Cong flag.
No. First the Viet Cong flag has no resonance among the US population. Second the Viet Cong fought against the US imperialists that took over S. Vietnam once the French colonialists had been defeated. Had the US not intervened to prevent the referendum on unification that was guaranteed under the Geneva Accords, there would not have been a US war in Indochina. The Viet Cong were to Vietnam what the US Revolutionaries were to the US.
A better analogy of a lost civil war would be the RVN flag.
Yes. However, what is interesting about the RVN flag is who and where it continues to be promoted and flown. Unlike the Confederacy, S. Vietnam received substantial support from numerous foreign governments. Countries to which the many of the losers in the Vietnam civil war fled. It’s those emigres and their descendants that maintain the RVN flag.
Like Florida and the Batista reactionaries.
Yes. Except Fidel was wily enough not to change the flag Cuba adopted in 1902. So, those that fled to the US were deprived of a flag to fly in Florida.
Stars and Bars are a swastika waiting for a Hitler.
The brownshirts, we got ’em.
President Obama says the confederate flag belongs in a museum. I think the banner of Southern treason belongs in a garbage can or a furnace.
A museum would be appropriate. Lest we forget.
This early afternoon I walked across Manhattan for a few blocks on W. 48th St. btw. 10th Ave + 8th Ave….going to a rehearsal hall in the neighborhood. I was carrying about 25 lbs. of musical equipment on my shoulders and was in no condition to deal with any physically intimidating assholes, but then again I had no particular reason to think that would need to do so. I am in that neighborhood…the so-called “Theater District”…at all hours of the day and night as part of how I make my living and although I always have my NYC street antennae up, that’s one of the least threatening neighborhoods in all of NYC.
Boy, was I wrong!!!
So there I am, about to enter a sidewalk area that has construction going on over it…a narrowly constricted sidewalk w/scaffolding erected over it to protect the pedestrians from dropped objects. No way off of the sidewalk into the street. Just before I get to that area I see the person walking maybe 40 feet of me…a smallish, brownish man about 50 or older, I guess…press himself up against the building to get out of the way of a big, nasty-looking young black man walking in our direction and yelling at the top of his lungs about “RACIST MOTHERFUCKERS!!!” shouldered his way past him.
I took a quick detour into the street before I got trapped having to pass him in the too-narrow confines of the construction site (Need I add that I am quite plainly of Northern European ascent?), and continued walking in the street along the parked cars. As I reached the place where we would be passing…me in the street, him sort of trapped behind the scaffolding as was my plan…he leaned over the barrier and started screaming about what a racist motherfucker I am for avoiding his obvious total lunacy and did I think that he didn’t know that I had avoided him on purpose. I paid him no mind…except for keeping my ears open to hear if he managed to get into the street with me and come up from behind, which he didn’t…and went on about my business of playing Pan-American musical idioms with bands of all colors. I thought about dialing 911, but by the time they responded he would have been somewhere else entirely, so I didn’t.
Why am I writing this?
Because those assholes Booman saw are not “white racist” assholes, they’re just assholes. Every so-called “race”…every culturally constructed, separatist/separated group…has its own share of assholes. So it goes.
So what?
Booman writes:
Up here…in the totally mixed-race streets and mass transit of NYC… what I saw reads to me as “I don’t like white people.”
So what!!!???
It’s just business as usual.
Fuggedaboudit and move on.
They’ll always be here, these fools.
Fuck ’em and the gene sink they rode in on. They’ll end up…as always…in the tarpits of history, and life will continue its evolutionary ways.
Bet on it.
Watch.
Big Gov can’t get rid of what it perceives to be “negative characters.”
It doesn’t work.
It backfires every time.
Bet on that as well.
Just ignore the fools.
Arrest the worst ones and let the others go on their devolving way.
They’ll go down eventually.
As they must.
Watch.
Later…
AG
“Why am I writing this?”
Because, Arthur Gilroy, your comments on this blog show you as a very consistent enabler of racists.
“So what!!!???”
Yes, so what of the virulent racism of Rand and Ron Paul and the Paul movement? So what of your irrational hatred of our President, a highly personal hatred which extends many miles past policy disagreements? So what of your support of voter suppression laws and Cliven Bundy? So what of your unwillingness to acknowledge the severe damage done to our society and our government by the racism of Lost Causers?
For a guy who claims to speak truth to us, you are totally unwilling to get real about yourself.
You make my day every time you write this kind of crap, centerfielddj.
Laughter is the best medicine.
Thank you.
AG
P.S. Make my day.
Please!!!
Arthur writes:
“Because those assholes Booman saw are not “white racist” assholes, they’re just assholes.”
Here’s the context under which the Confederate flag is being discussed these days:
http://gawker.com/here-is-what-appears-to-be-dylann-roofs-racist-manifest-1712767241
Among the many despicable things this Confederate fetishist vomited all over the Internet:
“The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right.”
So, if Arthur wants to directly equate a crazy person who made him unhappy by yelling at him but did him no real physical or civil rights harm with the sort of person who ends up taking their very common and quite poisonous Fox News-derived “knowledge” of the Martin killing into a church prayer service and slaughters a State Senator and eight others, he can go ahead.
If he wants to pretend that his support of voter ID laws is not in the service of racist politicians, some of whom have admitted that the intent of the laws in these States is to suppress the voting rights of African-Americans in order to elect radical conservatives into office, that is his choice.
Others who observe the parts of his insulting, dismissive rhetoric here which enable and support racist people and policies do not have to pretend. We do not have to make the choice Arthur is making, his choice to remain in full, furious denial.
I suspect Gilroy is closer to the best solution that wild-eyed purists ever will be, but it’s good to keep the social pressure on…
Don’t all New Yorkers throw their weight around like that? 🙂 [ducks]
; ))
But…you are right to duck, Tarheel. Not from me, of course, but from the haters. All of the haters. Most of them are all mouth and an inch deep anyway.
Duck ’em.
Unless they are coming your way with bad intentions.
Then?
Then you must defend yourself any way possible. In the above case I had already shifted the load I was carrying so that I was better balanced on my feet and taken my horn case off of my shoulder so that I could use it as a weapon if he went off on me. Running was out of the question…I am not about to drop $5K’s worth of equipment in the street and run, but if I were to dent it a little in a good cause? That’d be OK.
That shooter boyo in Charleston? Poisoned by Big Pharma, Big Psych and Big Med until he went ballistic. If it was possible to clone him as another race and pretty much duplicate his upbringing (including the meds), he would have gone off just the same, only on white people or Shi’ites or Sunnis or Jews or…whatever.
This culture has multiplied the level of hatred in people like this on a geometric order by our attempt to pharmacolize the treatment of emotional and mental disorders. The rising epidemic of wanton violence by young men on psych drugs? It is evidence of a drastic mistake that has been made in an attempt to tamp down the rage that some people feel. Why do they feel it? Genetics. Nothing more and nothing less. Sperm meets egg and there they jolly well are. Ticking time bombs from the getgo. The real question is…how do you best disarm a bomb? Apparently the early life med route being taken all over the country does not “disarm” that kind of bomb, it actually often makes it more powerful over a long-term med treatment while at the same time rendering the victim semi-catatonic so that he can be controlled in a “No Child Left Behind”-style educational system.
I have a friend who is teaching in an experimental school in a rough neighborhood of the Bronx. Kindergarten and first grade only/boys only. A nightmarish 10% to 15%…maybe even a higher percentage…of these boys are already essentially unteachable. They are either totally disruptive to the classroom experience, medicated to the point of near-catatonia or…the worst cases…flipping between those two poles at a truly alarming rate.
This sort of thing has been going on in mainstream U.S. schools for at least 15 years. That’s when I first encountered it, anyway. My son…who I had taught to stand up for himself and had gotten involved in martial arts…did just that in his suburban, bedroom community middle school/high school. Several times. He was not particularly happy at the time in a general sense, but then how many 14 year-old boys really are? He was doing well in school and had his own circle of friends, but since he was gifted physically in some ways the jocks wanted him to play football. He had no eyes for the whole jock scene himself, and he apparently said so quite plainly. A chip off the old block, i guess. Push came to shove; shove came to fight. So it goes, sometimes.
After a couple of incidents I was called to go talk to the principal. I did. I said that if the school couldn’t keep people’s hands off of my son in the halls then he was free to defend himself by any means necessary. She said he needed to go on meds. I told her over my dead body. She was shocked. “Shocked, I say!!!” Conversation over. So that goes as well.
I had no other friends in that town who had kids in its schools so I never really found out if my experience was a common one. I tried to talk about it at a PTA meeting but they were pretty much …shocked. “Shocked, I say!!!”…too. They didn’t want to talk about it. One of them even brought up the term “medical confidentiality” as an excuse for not talking about it.
Duh!!!
Anyway, all’s well that ends well. My son eventually went to a fairly free-style school for “exceptional” kids (Not necessarily smarter,” just…different…) and is now happily taking his doctorate in an important (important in terms of the survival of the ecosphere) area of ecological biology at an Ivy League school. He had “anger issues.” as the current lick goes…considering the state of the culture over the last 50 years or so, that sounds more to me like a recommendation on some levels than a diagnosis…and I sometimes wonder what would have happened to him if I had let the shrinks loose on his natural chemistry. We’ll never know because I didn’t. This Charleston kid? Who knows? We’ll never find that out either, and neither will the nine people that he killed or their families.
Just sayin’…
If that raver on 48th St. had been Western European or Asian or Hispanic I would have done exactly the same thing.
It really isn’t about “race;” it’s just about genetics and upbringing.
Nature and nurture.
ISIS and Mother Teresa.
Crips/Bloods and Mahatma Gandhi
Adolf Hitler and Martin Luther King Jr.
There are always the extremes
They’re always with us. Always will be, too…unless of course the robots do take over.
The real question is…as it has always been…what are we going to do about it?
I dunno, but I’ll tell you this…what we are doing now ain’t working.
Not even close.
Later…
AG
“genetics” ? I’m afraid you stepped in it there, Arthur.
Why, Voice? Are you not genetically predetermined within certain very specific parameters? If you are not then you represent an entirely new form of life on Earth as we know it.
Some people are pr4-determined towards anger. Others not so much. Some are pre-deternined towards intelligence. Others not so much. Some are pre-determined towards fear, others towards foolhardy braveness. Etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., right on down through hair color, favorite smells and the size of one’s nails
So what?
Where’s the beef?
AG
There’s no beef. It’s a knee-jerk reaction, the liberal version of quoting holy books.
Bullshit!!!
There is no way on earth that someone who is not genetically inclined to any combination of physical, emotional or mental statse can be magically transformed into someone else with radically different inclinations. No skinny 5’5″ kid is ever going to be an aggressive NBA center, no naturally retiring and gentle person is ever going to be a Navy Seal and no moderately intelligent person is ever going to be an Einstein, Mozart or Shakespeare. And vice-versa, right on up and down the human experience.
Sorry, but there it is.
Deal wid it.
We are what we are from the moment of conception. After that moment, it’s just dumb luck and civilization-induced moderate adjustments that ends up being “us.” Without civilization? Socialization? Dumb luck? It’s all Lord Of The Flies time.
Bet on it.
AG
Rep. Doug Brannon, born in Detroit, former mayor of Landrum SC, and representative from Spartanburg County will introduce the legislation. Will take it down in December.
Not soon enough.
Now that this concession has been made, I think it will be accelerated through protest and the public wanting to end the controversy.
South Carolina cities folded quickly on public accommodations in the early 1960s with threatened sit-ins.
Fixed.
Sorry to be a language pedant, but on these issues when people refer to “Southerners” they almost always mean “White Southerners.” It’Oan important distinction because otherwise you’re erasing from existence the millions of people who live in the South and are not White. I understand why the racists use that language, but it shouldn’t be the convention for anyone else.
Of course, there are plenty of people of good will among white southerners, too, but that’s a separate issue. Losing one of their own just might be enough to finally get the SC state legislature to act on the Scars and Bars.
More like a 150-year-old insurgency flag. “Next year in Richmond” Or Montgomery.
In 2000 the National Hockey League added an expansion team in Columbus, OH and it became named the “Blue Jackets”
I thought it an odd name for a while until I researched it. It refers to Ohio’s important roll in The Civil War. https:/en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_in_the_American_Civil_War
The name, logo and uniforms are explained here https:
/en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Blue_Jackets
I thought that was totally cool and still do. Throughout the South and elsewhere sports teams honor Rebels, Running Rebels and other references to the Confederacy, but to my knowledge this is the only example of a sports team celebrating Northern “heritage”.
Frankly I am well past tolerating and trying to understand Disneyfied and whitewashed Southern pride passing as patriotism. If some in the South still insist the war isn’t over then I am more than happy to return to common views of the South from my childhood. Then, the South was widely thought of in the North as full of corrupt racist and worthy of northern wrath. Bring on the FBI, the Northern “liberal” media, and every presidential candidate, the courts and squash the flag and everyone who flys it.
Andrew…
You write:
But…but…Andrew!!!
The north was…and remains…just a different style of “corrupt racism.” That’s the whole problem with this thing. When I was coming up in the late ’60s/early ’70s I consider myself privileged to have been a “minority” member in a very select non-white culture…the jazz and latin music communities. The people who comprised that group were in many respects the flower of their various cultures, because talent on any level for people of color was not easily rewarded or nourished during those times and before…even less easily than is the present case. However, the musical world in which they lived was a total meritiocracy. If you could play, you were OK. End of story. Talent…which is really just another manifestation of intelligence…flocked to areas where it would be rewarded.
To those people…many of whom were well into their 50s and 60s and had lived in the segregated U.S. both north and south their entire lives…Boston was the most feared place to go. Not Little Rock, not Atlanta or Dallas or New Orleans…Boston!!!
Why?
How?
Because the segregational rules in Boston were more…secretive. Less publicized, more easily crossed by accident and always enforced by either groups of armed (white) cops, groups of armed (white) criminals or quite often a combination of the two. The Irish and Italian mobs were in full swing at the time in Boston and could basically get away with anything they wanted to do. They owned both sides of the law. Like Whitey Bulger and his brother William…the “straight” politician…it was covered on all sides. The last thing that they wanted to do was was to let even a single person of color get any real power, let alone political or social groupings, so they enforced their own power at will on anybody who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The real difference between northern segregation and southern segregation was…and remains, really… this:
The north was better at it.
Subtler.
Harder to identify and confront, thus harder to beat.
Once you actually realize this in an on-the-street level, then statements like yours above reveal themselves to be as biased as the worst white southern peckerwood redneck’s insistence on running the good ol’ Stars and Bars off the roof of his beat-up pickup truck.
Both “sides” are wrong.
Bet on it.
AG
Abdrew:
Errrr….uhhhh…
“Yankees”
“Patriots”
Just for starters.
There must be more…
AG
There’s a lot more military culture and nationalism in the South, period. You simply don’t find that sort of hyper aggressive patriotic martialism in the rest of the country.
Every region of the US has a regional identity and culture. Outside of the Souths militarism and nationalism, the rest is of being shat on. The perpetual backwater mocked and taken advantage of by rich northern elites. Sure, New York and DC are hated because they are full of social liberals, but they are also hated because guess where all the finance/lobbyists/ect who keep screwing the rest of the nation so they can get rich are? And worst of all, they lost to the limped wristed rich assholes who keep screwing them over.
Anyways I knew a few people who had confederate flag stuff when I was in the Navy. I never got the impression it was about race, though maybe there were good at hiding it. Most all of them grew up poor as dirt and knew that were being screwed by rich coastal types who mocked them. The flag was a way of flipping those people the bird and showing that the insults and stereotypes didn’t bother them. Some of them were assholes some weren’t. Which was odd, because growing up I always thought it was just about racism.
Symbols have all sorts of meaning to all sorts of people. For example the ace of spades, skull, and black rose all mean death. But those, or any combination of those might not mean death in a literal sense. They could refer to the end of a painful part of life and starting over. People using symbols are saying something, but not everyone is saying the same thing.
The confederate flag certainly shouldn’t be a part of official state functions or flown by the government, but I don’t always jump to conclusions when I see it. I go for context and observation. Not all rednecks are shit kickers.
Then they were flying the wrong flag.
Most of them grew up poor as dirt and were taught that they were better than Blacks and it was African-Americans that threatened their privilege.
If they have a glimmer of awareness as to which factions in the US population benefit from keeping them poor, they wouldn’t sign up to fight the rich men’s wars or vote to make the wealthy wealthier.
Indiana
Actually, all rednecks are shitkickers. They’re synonyms. Where in the south did you grow up?
There are plenty of people in Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Birmingham who are only too happy to screw rednecks financially and psychologically.
I live in Va. We have lots of flags and of course these
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/12/28/popularity-dont-tread-on-me-plates-in-virginia-suggests-t
ea-party-still-strong/
Someone in my neighborhood has a car with those plates. I view that license plate the same way I would of it had confederate regalia decorating the car. Same message.
Lo and behold, on my way to breakfast this morning I saw a truck right in front of us at the red light which had a confederate regalia license plate, “Sons of Confederate Veterans”. And right along side it? A “don’t tread on me” bumper sticker.
Really? In 1976 the US Navy was selling Revolutionary War naval ensigns with that design. At least to it’s sailors and employees. Are you British?
“… Our idea is simply to combine the present battle flag with a pure white standard sheet, our Southern cross, blue, on a red field, to take the place in the white flag that is occupied by the blue union in the old United States flag or the St. George’s cross in the British flag. As a people, we are fighting to maintain the heaven ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race. A white flag, would thus be emblematical of our cause.”
~William Thompson, designer of the second national flag of the Confederacy which flew from 1863-1865
Of course, a white flag has another meaning.
in Florida I learned long ago why people put confederate bumper stickers on their cars:
Because they can.
It is a symbol of white power pure and simple. It has no other purpose. It is a symbol of white defiance triumphant.
“Don’t like it? I dare you to try and take it off”
I have begun to ask these Confederat loving shitheels why they don’t honor the Confederacy by flying the last official flag flown by them, the white flag of surrender.
Seems to rankle them when you point out that they were losers on the battlefield.
Like George W. Bush, the Secessionists picked a war to fight that they could not logistically win. It was always a matter of time. Southern Unionist Democrats told them before the war and then told them so after the surrender. Those Southern Unionist Democrats were often the first Reconstruction governors appointed by Andrew Johnson.
Likewise the Japanese in the Pacific War. When Yamamoto told them that they could not win a long war, the right wingers tried to assassinate him.
The problem in both cases is believing your own racist propaganda. In that vein, how could Hitler think that Germany could defeat a combined USA, UK, and Russia?
Maybe someone has written on this before, and if so I apologize in advance. Does anyone except me see similarities in the 1860 hysteria of “Lincoln’s going to take our slaves!” and the present-day hysteria “Obama’s going to take our guns!” Both ideas were used to whip people into a bug-eyed frenzy, and both had very little basis in fact. At the start of his presidency, Lincoln’s position on slavery mainly had to do with its expansion, not doing anything about it where it already existed. And we all know the “taking our guns away” crap is total hyperbole (or more accurately, lies). Reasonable (or any) regulation is hardly confiscation.
While I agree with you, you will find many people here that advocate ending private ownership of guns. Unfortunately, that advocacy feeds the Tea party.
Has it been noted that Indiana just legalized sawed off shotguns? Just what you need for home defense or domestic disputes or shopping without cash.
A short-barreled, pistol-grip shotgun in .410 gauge is the perfect home defense weapon against actual home invasion/burglary.
Or you can load birdshot cartridges in your 38 revolver…
You need a gun that won’t penetrate walls, and is short enough to swing in close quarters.