Wars of Independence — Moving On

In 1776, two hun­dred and thirty four years ago, what is now the United States of Amer­ica and what is now the United King­dom of Great Britain and North­ern Ire­land started a war to deter­mine whether they would be sep­a­rate coun­tries. There was a fool­ish dis­agree­ment that started the argu­ment all over again in 1812.

Now, in spite of all the patri­otic rah-rah over the cel­e­bra­tion of this sep­a­ra­tion in the United States, these two coun­tries have become what may well be each other’s clos­est allies. Most past ani­mosi­ties have been long since for­got­ten. Very few cit­i­zens of the UK still hold a seri­ous grudge against the USA for rebelling so many years ago. Well, at least we don’t think they do. Is Still Here’s very British grand­fa­ther never told him sto­ries of such grudges.

There was another war over sep­a­ra­tion fought by the USA. This one started a lit­tle more recently, in 1861, one hun­dred and forty nine years ago. Hardly yes­ter­day; but by some people’s behav­ior you would think the war was fought within less than a gen­er­a­tion. This was a war between fam­i­lies. There was a clear vic­tory. There was no sep­a­ra­tion of the USA. We remain one country.

And yet, some peo­ple still fight the war; at least in a very dis­turb­ing, passive-aggressive way. They say they are just hon­or­ing the mem­ory of those who fought for the rebel­lious Con­fed­er­ate States of Amer­ica. Maybe they are.

But we think they are fight­ing a very dif­fer­ent war. We can think of no rea­son for fly­ing a 60’x30’ Con­fed­er­ate flag at the inter­sec­tion of two of the busiest inter­state high­ways in a state with an African-American pop­u­la­tion of over 2.5 mil­lion than to make a racial state­ment. We do not care if the flag is fly­ing at a pri­vately held memo­r­ial to Con­fed­er­ate war dead. The size of the flag at that loca­tion is so purely offen­sive it can only be a polit­i­cal state­ment meant to gen­er­ate social strife. Per­haps the goal is not a shoot­ing war. But it is a war.

The orig­i­nal attempt at sep­a­ra­tion was over many issues but racial issues were clearly one of these issues and were woven into almost all of the others.

Peo­ple of the Old South, you need to learn a les­son from the UK.

Is Still Here & Still Here Too