Apropos of the latest news coming from, among other places, Charlottesville, a personal observation.

I’ve mentioned before that I was born in a communist country which my parents fled from.  I spent my formative early years in a country that could best be described as having a system very close to European Socialism.  I then moved to a country that was a right winger’s wet dream: A country that had almost no taxes and therefore no civil services to speak of, was heavily catholic and outlawed abortion, and was incredibly, depressingly, terrible.

I then moved to and settled into the United States, which I’ve always felt had the best of all worlds.

But when I first moved to the U.S. and was enrolled in a boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida, I was taken aback when I saw things like this…

This is not, by the way, a photograph I took back then, but it represents the type of things I saw.  Not everywhere, mind you, but enough to wonder why.

For to me, my entire life up until the moment I enrolled in that sophomore year of High School, the Confederacy was always viewed -I thought anyway!- the wrong side of history in the years leading up and after to the Civil War.

They were, after all, fighting for one thing: The ability to keep owning slaves.  That couldn’t be viewed as a good thing to people, right?

So why was it that I was seeing people hanging the Confederate Flag here and there and displaying it on their pickup trucks/cars?

And I wondered, young though I was, how the African American population must feel upon seeing these flags here and there.

Times have changed, thankfully, since then.  I’ve been to Jacksonville very recently and I don’t see these types of displays at all.  Then again, I’m not living there so whatever I’ve seen has been based on sticking around the city a few days at a time.

Later on I came to understood the mythology built around the “lost cause” of the Confederacy.  But this mythology avoided mention of the issue of slavery and, instead, focused on the Civil War being somehow about “state rights”.

It was still bewildering because I impossible to not associate the Confederacy with slavery.

Today, as the “alt-right” and the Nazi’s have much of the nation’s attention, I’m finding it interesting to see the push back.  I suppose the old physics notion of every action having an equal and opposite reaction applies to people as well.

So yesterday some people took aim at a statue commemorating “the boys who wore gray” (the article is by David A. Graham and is found on The Atlantic):

Durham’s Confederate Statue Comes Down

Here’s the full video of the event as it happened:

The backlash to the backlash.

Interesting times.