Leonard Pitts Jr.: When ignorance of history, civility meet

via the Detroit Free Press:



When ignorance of history, civility meet
BY LEONARD PITTS JR. • McCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS • May 5, 2009


A few days ago, a high school student in Sarasota, Fla., failed history and another failed civics. As a result, the one wound up shot in the chest and the other jailed on a charge of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon.

Here's the story, as reported by the Sarasota Herald Tribune: On the last Friday in April, an 18-year-old white kid named Daniel Azeff and a friend went riding downtown in a pickup truck, yelling racially disparaging remarks and waving a Confederate battle flag. Azeff's grandfather, Joseph Fischer, told the paper he has cautioned his grandson repeatedly about his fascination with that dirty banner. Azeff, he said, does not really understand what the flag means.

If so, he's hardly alone in his ignorance. A generation of apologists for the wannabe nation symbolized by that flag has done an effective job of convincing the gullible and the willfully ignorant that neither the nation, the flag, nor the Civil War in which both were bloodily repudiated has anything to do with slavery. It's just "heritage," they say, as though heritage were a synonym for "good." As though Nazis, white South Africans and Rwandans did not have heritage, too.

For the record: In explaining its decision to secede, South Carolina cited "an increasing hostility on the part of the nonslaveholding states to the institution of slavery." Georgia noted its grievances against the North "with reference to the subject of African slavery."

Mississippi said, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery." To which Confederate "vice president" Alexander Stephens added: "Our new government is founded upon ... the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition." ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.freep.com/article/20090505/OPINION05/905050305

From the article: "On the last Friday in April, an 18-year-old white kid named Daniel Azeff and a friend went riding downtown in a pickup truck, yelling racially disparaging remarks and waving a Confederate battle flag."

He's a racist asshole, but he's not ignorant. That kid knows exactly what the flag means.

They just deny its meaning and try to put lipstick on the pig by calling it "heritage" and "states rights"
He was lucky in his stupidity.
"Stupidity is the only universal capital crime, and sentence is carried out immediately with no hope of appeal."