Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has been reading over the comments to his recent blogging adventures and he’s decided that his (virtual) friend The Ancient’s comment deserves to be moved up. Here tis:

A few miles from where we live in the country, this environmental atrocity has recently appeared –

http://www.cootersplace.com/museum/cooters-sperryville/

My wife remarked that it would inevitably depress property values in the county. I demurred, but the more I thought about it, the more I came to think she’s right. And when I see as caravan of sixty pickup trucks bearing Battle Flags racing down 211, as I did last weekend, I wince.

I’m closely related to both Jefferson Davis and Tecumseh Sherman. A ggg-grandfather died leading the Confederate charge into the Peach Orchard on the second day at Gettysburg. Another was a senior Union officer at Fredericksburg. And I am sick to death of people who claim the Battle Flag is all about their ancestors and “The Honored Dead.” Because the sort of men who drive pick-up trucks with the Battle Flag are also the sort of men who don’t know their grandmothers’ maiden names.

Once upon a time one could reasonably make an argument about “heritage.” No more. The Battle Flag means anti-black racism. Everything else is a smokescreen. Flying the Battle Flag in 2015 doesn’t mean you support the Klan. It doesn’t mean you want to resegregate the public schools. It doesn’t mean a lot of things. But it does mean you’re morally tone-deaf.

Ahhh… Your Maximum Leader knows Cooter’s Place. He hasn’t been inside the one in Sperryville, but he knows where it is. He actually has visited (once) the one in Nashville. He was taken there by a business associate on a lark.

Your Maximum Leader cannot agree more with so many of The Ancient’s points in his comments. While your Maximum Leader can’t specifically cite any ancestors’ service in the Civil War (though he’s been told that they were Union vets from Ohio and Pennsylvania in the family), he’s sure he has some. And frankly he’d be willing to guess that there were some on both sides. That said, we are modern people living in another age from our ancestors. Our blood is not attainted by an ancestors service on to the Confederacy in a way that we should feel an obligation to make history what it isn’t.

Part of your Maximum Leader’s point in the two Civil War related posts he’s put up is to observe that history is what it is. We can move on from it in a constructive way, or we can choose not to. Your Maximum Leader doesn’t want to forget or diminish our history, he also doesn’t want to sanitize it. But history has a context and knowledge of that context should inform our actions today.

Also, for what it is worth, The Ancient has pickups bearing Confederate flags tearing by his home. In your Maximum Leaders area (of Stafford and Fredericksburg, VA) the pickups bear both the US flag and the Confederate flag. He’ll have to get some photos of one next time he sees one. (Which will probably be tomorrow…)

Carry on.