Flying a Confederate flag with pride - in Wellesley

the Confederate flag at least one time I noticed right after I moved there, on a pole in his back yard that is not visible from the street. Every other time I looked, he flew the black POW/MIA flag instead. I was loath to ask him about it.

Apparently Cooter seems to have gotten a steal on some wicker at a local yard sale.

Can we nuke a Kid Rock show next time he comes around? It might get rid of this guy and a lot of their local brethren.

And we can all point and laugh at them to exercise ours.

Nothing says "the driver of this vehicle is a moronic backward idiot" like a confederate flag. In this area, its about two levels below truck nuts.

Which local talk radio host and noted racist lives in Wellesley.......?

Just wondering.

Your link does a good job of adding a bit of nuance to understanding the later perception of The Civil War. I see that reunion as a gesture of reconciliation, symbolized by the two men who together purchased and then buried a hatchet. Small but great deed. Beautiful symbol of mutual forgiveness.

Good men and women from the north and south suffered and died. Nevertheless we can not afford to forget that the climax of southern states antipathy against the north which followed the election of Lincoln via the subsequent treasonous succession. No less a great liberal jurist known as Anton Scalia affirmed that states do not have the right to secede from the Union. So a flag that represented at attempt at a nation illegally and militarily carved out of the nation is a flag that represents treason and carries no honor.

Nevertheless we are human beings. Do we dishonor those men and women who supported the secession or do we seek reconciliation and forgiveness? When people alive during the war were still alive reconciliation was needed. This was reconciliation for the very individuals affected.

But today there is no need for reconciliation because no one who fought during that war is alive. Some might say that they lost their inheritances due to the war. But inheritances are lost all the time to parents who waste their fortunes (or by the people who receive the inheritances through their own imprudence). But they have no right to make a moral or legal claim that the mistakes of the forbearers entitle them compensation. So if a person today claims that they did not receive an inheritance due to the choices to stay with the Confederacy then they are out of luck. Their forbearers chose treason and received the penalty.

Nevertheless if we don't remember that we can be fractious and that our disagreements can lead to terrible blood shed then we run a greater risk of forgetting the lessons of the past. Hence there is value in remembering the past in appropriate ways. For southerners who identify with a direct connection to the antebellum south I can understand the desire to honor the people who their ancestors were or were related to especially through the use memorials. But when there no longer is anyone directly tied to the Civil War are even memorials honoring the Confederacy appropriate? I am ambivalent. On the on hand a memorial honors treason; on the other hand Confederate memorials humanizes people who made a grave mistake (and so reminds that anyone can make mistakes) and it they are a reminder that no matter how great we believe that the U.S. is, it is many ways still terribly flawed.

Still people who have no ancestral or even solid and intelligently legitimate claim to the intellectual legacy of the antebellum south can not make a claim to the honor and dignity of the past. They are just using symbols of the past - regardless of the nuances of meaning in the past - to represent and advocate their positions of the present. The Confederate flag today can represent the history of the Confederacy but, as said by others, it now belongs in museums recognizing and remembering the past. But as a symbol of the today it's a symbolic representation of the Confederate states committing treason and it represents one of the keystones of the philosophical arch that formed the Confederacy: the supposed right of whites to enslave blacks.

So I can see the monuments that remember the past. Monuments to Confederate people implicitly recognize that they lost in their attempt at secession (and for anyone paying attention at treasonous secession) but acknowledge that these were people of the very same land and in all ways of the same history.

The United States has attempted near genocide. It attempted to destroy Indian cultures by stealing their land and by eliminating Indian cultures by forced assimilation into white culture. The United States even in its Constitution enshrined slavery and reduced human beings of a certain skin color and ancestor to counting as 3/5ths of a human being for governmental counting. These were wrongs that are slowly being righted. But one way to emphatically continue the wrong where slavery is concerned is to use the Confederate flag as contemporary symbol of meaning.

The enslavement of black men and women comes under the same category of human abuse as the Nazis in their attempt at eugenics; the U.S. of course had its own comparable eugenics movement for "purifying the race." Germany wisely does not permit the display of the Nazi flag (going so far as to criminalize the action). While our legal tradition is to tolerate the near intolerable, and so tolerate people who use flags that represent movements and ideologies that we find abhorrent today, we can take from their example the recognition that symbols which stand in large part for one of the worst human rights abuses should not ever be used with any degree of pride or affirmation.

lives in Wellesley?

We don't have to like what he stands for, but we have to respect his freedom of speech and expression.