Thursday, April 2, 2015

A Crisis of Confederates...

I am a Southerner and an American. I am white and a male. My home is near the geographic heart of the U.S.’ continental pudenda. A collection of sandbars connecting an archipelago of high spots now inundated with what passes for civilization. I say that without intending irony.

Florida, like so many places where the water meets the sea seems always in crisis. A crisis in the economy, a crisis in education, a water crisis, crisis ad infinitum and still a crisis over Confederates?  The war between the states may have ended in 1865 but not the strife.  Florida’s role in the conflict was negligible though decisive.  The Confederates held and many ancestral Floridians still take pride in that.

However, our governor and vampire-in-chief, Nosferatu, demurs siding instead with the righteous indignation of the NAACP in barring inclusion of a few distinguished members of the Confederacy precisely because they were NOT United States military.  Honorable service and post-war achievements aside, they were wrong, so nyah!  Serves you right you slavers!

But isn’t this place named the Florida Veterans Hall of Fame?  Weren’t they Floridians?  Or is this a Federally funded installation or another usurpation of state’s rights?  Or just the misgivings of a plutocrat ill equipped to see clear what is dear to many of his constituents? 

Who am I kidding?  By constituents, I meant the people of Florida.  Governor Scott’s constituents are predominantly transcontinental oligarchs sensitive only to a shortage of Beluga and Cristal.  So who can blame him?  He doesn’t know any poor or working class people.  Those characterized by the English author Lord Lytton as the great unwashed.  Those considered mere chattel to be corralled and ruled or at least made into cannon fodder to fight wars whereby some future stone edifice might bear the names of those sacrificed on the altar of a bad cause.  Sound familiar?

The governor should be ashamed for not finding a way to illuminate both sides of gallantry in this latest monument to a sanitized past.  Shame on Nosferatu. Bad vampire, bad!

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