I'm tired of the media making this a black versus white issue and playing the race card to try to fit their political correct agenda. I have no problem with the current flag and wish the media and the so-called leaders of the NAACP would allow me to speak for myself and quit assuming how I feel because I am black. Stop trying to make whites feel guilty for something you have not experienced nor will ever experience.
[Name: Meredith] [State: Mississippi] [Race: African-American] [Sex: Female] [Choice: No Change] [Vote Type: Referendum] [01/08/01]
~ Posted on the forum website
On Tuesday, April 17, 2001, 65 percent of the citizens of Mississippi who cast their ballot in a special election decided in favor of keeping the state flag as it has existed since 1894, a flag that incorporates the Confederate battle emblem in it's upper left corner.
One could hear the clucking of tongues and the "tut-tut-tut's" emanating from the mouths of the limousine liberals and Beltway intelligentsia almost instantaneously.
In an editorial published by the Atlanta Constitution on Thursday, April 19, 2001 entitled "Mississippi will suffer for its Legislature's cowardice," the liberal editorial board takes the following position:
"Had integration and the scrapping of Jim Crow laws depended on public ballot rather than federal courts, there would probably be regions of the South today where black and white students would be forced to attend separate schools and drink from different water fountains.
Similarly, had Georgia relied on a public referendum to decide whether to change our divisive flag, we would be where Mississippi finds itself today – a state so bound to its past that it cannot rise to meet its future."
For a group who is still bound up by the fact that Al Gore won the popular vote and lost the last presidential election, this is certainly a surprising turn of events. Suddenly the liberals no longer want the democracy that they claim to love, with their voting blocs of entitlement-beholden voters, and would prefer a return to a representative republic. One is left to surmise that the democratic process of referendum on issues of import to the state is only valuable if the people can be trusted to do "the right thing." Otherwise, they will have to take the vote away from the common man and place it with "courageous" legislators who can more frequently be counted on to make the politically correct decision.
Well, huzzah and three cheers for the brave citizens of Mississippi for telling these know-it-all bastards to take the proverbial long walk off a short pier!
Oh, sure, Mississippians are going to be subjected to all sorts of threats from various groups that there will be boycotts, or that such-and-such corporation has decided not to relocate to some rural Mississippi community because of the "flag issue". There will be the public denunciations, the endless jokes about how hopelessly backward the citizens of Mississippi are, the typical civic insults hurled by the sanctimonious purveyors of socialist dogma from coast to coast.
So be it.
The citizens of Mississippi were smart enough to realize that they were going to be the poor cousin of the elite media in New York, Washington and Los Angeles no matter what they did. The token "pat on the head" that they would have received for changing the state flag would in no way have had any lasting change on how the liberal elite in America view Mississippi, nor would it have had any significant impact on whether corporate America proceeds to invest there.
The people of Mississippi know what they have in their state. They know the beauty of the Natchez Trace, the history of Vicksburg, the legacy of Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha County, Clarkesdale, and the mythic "Crossroads" of blues legend Robert Johnson, Tupelo: the battlefield, and the birthplace of the King, Oxford and the Rebels of Ole Miss, and all the rest that is great about the state.
Most of Mississippi's detractors have never set foot in the state. All they know, or think they know, has come to them second hand, by way of a media elite, who want nothing more than to have somewhere to call "worse than here". Of course, they will trot out the usual statistics to show how much better their government schools are, or how much more public funding they provide for the indigent, or how much nicer their taxpayer funded this-or-that is. Once done, they will heave a collective sigh of relief that, even though their state may not be perfect, they are at least better off than the poor souls living in Mississippi.
Mississippians are well aware of this cultural chauvinism, and they are well aware of where these cultural chauvinists stand on the issue of their state flag. Tuesday, Mississippi collectively told them where they could stuff it.
"Attention all carpetbaggers and scalawags: Don't let the door hit ya'll in the backside on your way out!"
Hallelujah!
April 21, 2001
Jef Allen is a technology professional in Georgia. As a reformed Yankee, who has lived in the South for roughly twenty years, he has very little tolerance for Northern sanctimony, or the erosion of individual liberty.
