One of the silliest things humans squabble about is
this or that pattern of color, whether on cloth or on monitors.
Recently I “rainbow-ed” my Facebook icon after
reading a BBC article about Russian and Arab anger over the Facebook
application, otherwise I would not have known about the app. Express your
anger, spread the word, encourage more people to support what you're angry
about. Then you can be even angrier.
BBC also reported that a Syrian tweeted: "Damn
you and your marriage. You have distorted our innocent childhood [symbol], we
used to like the rainbow." Actually, the rainbow as a political symbol
goes back at least as far as Jessie Jackson's Rainbow Coalition of the
1980s. It had nothing to do with being gay, or for that matter, with being
black. It is a symbol of inclusiveness, of respecting every "race, color,
creed, or national origin." But
now, every time it rains while the sun is shining, this Syrian will damn Allah’s
rainbow.
Nearly simultaneous with the Facebook
rainbow app flap on the heels of the US Supreme Court decision legalizing
same-sex marriage is the flap over the Confederate battle flag on the heels of a
mass shooting at an African-American church in South Carolina. It is reported that
the shooter also considered a university campus as his target, so it is not at
all clear that this was a crime perpetrated by someone who harbored hatred of any
particular class of people, whether African-American or Christian; his target
might just as easily have been college students: secular, white, whatever.
Nevertheless, many people are exploiting the shooting to further their pet
political agendas, and the grief of loved ones gets shoveled under.
If this symbol offends you, what
does that say about you?
Meanwhile, there are T-shirts that
proclaim, “If this flag offends you, you need a history lesson.” I respectfully
disagree. If this flag offends you, you need to come to Jesus, because if you
hate this symbol, that’s just another form of hate.
“And if thine right eye offend thee,
pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into
life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.” –Matthew 5:29
I thought the symbolism was
painfully obvious: a swastika dripping blood superimposed on the Russian flag. You
see, Russians are quick to call their enemies fascists. It makes them feel good
about whatever they want to do. The Maidan revolution in Kiev that brought down
Vladimir Putin’s pet Ukrainian president was a conspiracy of fascists, not a
blow for liberty, so invasion, occupation, annexation, infiltration, insurrection… anything goes. My
icon was intended to make the point that the Putin government is the real
conspiracy of fascists. Almost everyone outside of Russia who has any inkling
of world affairs understands this. Nevertheless, I was accused of being a Nazi,
and about a hundred people “unfriended” me.
“If thine right eye offend thee….”
Now, some people may know that the
swastika is
even today considered to be a sacred and auspicious symbol in Hinduism,
Buddhism and Jainism. That’s several hundred million people, maybe around a
billion people. Are they wrong? It is even found on a Roman mosaic in Sicily,
which precedes Benito Mussolini by more than a few years. So, just as
Shakespeare’s Juliet posed the question, what’s in a name, which is after all
no more than a verbal symbol, what’s in a visual symbol?
Context.
And if one doesn’t understand the
context, one doesn’t understand the intent behind the symbol. That’s how I lost
a hundred Facebook friends.
“If thine right eye offend thee….”
As a US Air Force officer during the
Cold War, I hated this symbol:
I got over it. In fact, a quarter
century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I must admit to some nostalgia.
Maybe that says something about how professional military officers view each
other, that even men who bear arms against each other might be brothers in
arms, or maybe it’s just easy to put aside the hatred because we avoided a
shooting war. Also, in continuing my education and becoming a political
scientist, I actually read some of the wicked works of those devils Marx and
Lenin. I suspect that in the long run Marx is right; capitalism will play out
and be replaced by something else, but probably not any time soon. Where Lenin
and the others who followed him went wrong was in attempting to force the
process into a quicker timeline, but if their methods were unsound, so were
those of Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, J. Edgar Hoover, and many others on “our side.”
In any case, there were far more ordinary men than either good men or evil men
who served under that red banner, and meanwhile the hammer and sickle inevitably
becomes less odious as the last generation of cold warriors goes gentle or not ‘into
that good night.”
So how is it that the Confederate
battle flag, a relic of a war fought by our great-great-grandfathers, still
stirs up so much emotion? The last veteran of that war is long dead. The last
freedman is dead. The South isn’t trying to secede. Why should anyone still care
about this silly bit of cloth?
Context.
That, and like a Rorschach inkblot,
it’s mostly about what’s behind your eyes rather than what’s in front of them.
To some, the Confederate battle flag
is a symbol of racism, oppression, and terrorism, not only because of its use
during a war fought to preserve the institution of slavery, but mostly because
of its use by white supremacists and criminals ever since.
They are right.
To some, the Confederate battle flag
is a symbol of patriotism, valor, and sacrifice, of resistance against Northern
aggression and despotic military rule, of defiance of a national government
that destroyed the regional economy and did little to rebuild it until a
century later.
They are also right.
So neither side is absolutely right.
What happens when both sides believe
with every fiber of their being that they are absolutely right and the other
side is absolutely wrong, and one side backs the other into a corner? The Civil
War… and really, all wars. People get killed, maimed, displaced, impoverished,
and it never makes much sense. It makes absolutely no sense to turn a quarrel
over some colored cloth into a Manichean conflict of good versus evil. The only
way the quarrel can avoid the spilling of blood is by each side beginning to
understand that they are not absolutely right and that the other side is not
absolutely wrong.
The struggle over the Confederate
battle flag, on either side, will feed no hungry person, will clothe no cold
person, will house no homeless person, will do no good work of any kind. There
are substantive issues in our nation that cry out for our attention. This is
not one of them, so you should look in his right eye the person who is trying
to convince you otherwise and ask why your right eye should offend you.
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