I've always sympathized with the Confederate cause. My children all scoff when a classmate cites Lincoln as the greatest President. The "provincial" cause of states' rights, and the freedoms exercised by the confederate states to secede when the greater political power of the Yankees was aligned against them for economic superiority and the political lessons from those events are all things I've taught my children to consider when they are of voting age. I love the southern spirit and their independence. I mourn the Constitutional Republic that was fundamentally and fatally changed by the Union's victory in the war.
That having been said I've become confident that had the war gone the other way I would also mourn, for that Declaration of Independence condemns the ownership of one man by another every bit as much as it defends the provincialism of local governance and its resulting self determination.
Had the South won I am confident our republic would have been equally flawed as the one in which we now reside, though perhaps in different ways (and perhaps not). That flaw is the one many are reminded of when they they see the stars & bars even though I (and I like to believe the majority of those who wave it) see the ideals mentioned in my first paragraph. If I'm intellectually honest I can understand that.
In the end I understand the offense of those who celebrate a different side of the war. I sure wish, however, that we didn't live in such a hypersensitive time where one persons' expression of an ideal could "offend" in such a way as this. It's sad to me that our country is degrading the way it is.
Of course the ultimate irony of all of this is that in the end provincialism will lose to the "urbane (vacuous) globalism" of the "New World Order" and we'll all become slaves to it. That, we see, in this instance of our lack of freedom of self-expression.
