When I wrote this, in 2015, I was referring to the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. Today, though – 4 July, 2021 – it applies to the Stars and Stripes, as well. Next week, it will apply to some other flag or symbol, and another after that, until there is nothing left of Human culture but the putrefied offal of misbegotten philosophies.
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The meaning of a symbol is not in the symbol, but in the minds of those who see it. If a flag speaks to you of honor, courage, devotion, sacrifice, and so many other virtues, those meanings are in your mind. On the other hand, if a flag speaks to you of hate, prejudice, violence, and genocide, that meaning, too, is in your mind.
To ban a symbol because some people see evil in it is to put those people’s emotions above and superior to the emotions of those who see it as the opposite. Such a ban essentially says, “These people over here are who this country is about, and those people over there are no longer welcome here,” not because of the behavior of either group, but because of the way they view an inanimate symbol.
It is, in every literal respect, a ban on a way of thinking, rather than on behavior or actions. The left has emphasized outlawing certain ideas, and even emotions, whether they were acted upon or not. The American left has become a force of thought police, the enemies of that which makes mankind mankind – that which makes us created in the image of Our Father, not in appearance, but in knowledge of good and evil.
Virtue is possible only when men can choose how to act, for there can be neither vice nor virtue in compulsion. Since choice is a mechanism of the mind – of our ideas and what we think – the left’s effort to banish certain thoughts is an explicit attack on that which makes us human, and which makes virtue possible.
Wess Rodgers – rebsarge.wordpress.com – Albuquerque, NM
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