The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The KKK in South Carolina is holding a rally to protest the banning of the Confederate flag last week, I assume mostly as a recruitment tactic. The mizzus was surprised the KKK still exists. Admittedly there’s no active chapter on the South End. Course, we don’t have a whole lot of minorities a KKK could light crosses in their front yards. You want a hate club, you need someone to hate, otherwise you might just as well join the Moose or Rotary.

Rudy, down at the Diner’s Debate Society, sometimes gets up on his high heels to rant about the ‘War on White Males’, but Anita, the current owner, usually cuts his legs off at the knees with her sarcasm. “Wait til after Hillary’s elected,” she called over to Rudy’s table of male pensioners hoping she wasn’t going to cut off their coffee pipeline. “When she stops you poor white boys’ Social Security payments down to what us women get, then you can talk to me about Male Discrimination. Course, I’d be glad to hire you victims on as morning waitresses, let YOU work for the measley tips you high-rollers leave.”

Rudy’s like a lot of folks these days, one of the oppressed. Taxes too high, jobs too scarce, the country —or so he thinks —is on the downward slide. He blames immigrants, he blames the damn government, he’d blame global warming if he didn’t think it was a left wing conspiracy mostly to bring him down a few more notches. And he blames women for expecting equal pay, equal jobs, equal rights. He thinks Bruce Jenner’s sex change is an act of treason to us he-men.

I watch Anita pour him his 4th cup of joe. He meekly says thanks, but we all know he resents being challenged. Rudy lives in an insular world of bitterness. Bitterness to WHAT, I don’t know. We live in a world of plenty, a peaceful world, a world most folks would envy. Nothing seems sadder to me than a refusal to be happy. But Rudy and his kin the KKK are looking for fresh recruits who think the oppressed are the oppressors. Maybe Anita has the right idea — give him a refill of kindness and hope for miracles.

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There are people who think the Civil War is over. They even think the North won. All I can say — as a person who grew up down in Dixie — Gen. Robert E. Lee may have surrendered at Appomattox, but the South sure didn’t. Slavery might’ve officially ended, but white supremacy didn’t disappear with the Emancipation Proclamation.

The Confederate flag, what some folks declare as a symbol of southern pride and its honorable heritage, still flies at state capitals and is still a part of their own state flags and license plates. These people will tell you, with a straight face, the War was fought over state’s rights. Not slavery. Oh no, not slavery. Just the state’s right to own slaves. And the War of Independence was fought over soggy teabags, I suppose. These folks think our birthday was yesterday.

The Confederate flag still flies because these people are still fighting the Civil War, still denying Africans, now African-Americans, the vote, equal rights, a proper place in the post-bellum South. They resent the current president, in large part because he’s an uppity black man. Or half black man. Which, for the proud Confederates, is totally black. The Republican Party, happy to jump on the racist bandwagon, what we call the ‘Southern Strategy’, fans the flame that’s been smoldering for 150 years.

This week a few shame-faced Southerners called for banning the rebel flag in light of the killing of 9 innocent black churchgoers by an Aryan nation nazi bigot who paraded himself under that same flag and decided to wage war on the inferior race that was trying to take over his white country. Even Walmart has said it will no longer sell Confederate merchandise, profits be damned!

Germany banned the swastika. Nazism was a national scar that would take generations to heal. But they’re willing to try. The South … not so much. 150 years later and they’re still in denial over the stain of slavery. If you think this is the final surrender, you don’t know the South. Ban the flag, but don’t assume they’ll be saluting Old Glory any time soon. Not in your lifetime anyway. Not in mine. There’s no truce. Just another bitter indignity to endure. Just more salt in old wounds.

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