sounds stupid but then again, arent you supposed to name things after winners not losers
He may not have won the war, but pretty much everyone, Union and Confederate, agreed that Robert E. Lee was anything but a loser.
I agree it sounds lame, but there are some people who really get up in arms over it.
Living in Texas right in the Bible Belt, I gotta tell 'ya if you stick a confederate flag bumper sticker on your car and park in one of the lovely 'hoods in South Dallas there is a 100% chance your car will get shot up and a 99% chance you will get shot as well. They don't play around with that stuff down here.
I've had many an African-American co-worker and I can say I've seen many of them speak with extreme passion about what that flag means to them. People who live outside of the South probably wouldn't understand why it's a big deal to some folks.
Honestly living in the South if I ever had the cash for a General Lee I'd have the Texas flag painted on top just to make sure I didn't get slashed tires or bullet holes in my car. I know the CF doesn't mean I support anything or believe anything one way or the other, but it's still a terrible idea to display it unless you are looking for a fight.
There was a Civil War group (Sons of the Confederacy or something) this year that wanted the confederate flag as an option on license plates. Nope. Petitions and public outcry steered the company who makes the plates to not offer that option.
I can sort of see that reaction, yeah. I mean, imagine being a WWII reenactor in, say, Tel Aviv, walking around in a Wermacht uniform. Even if your attitude is "We just think the Germans had the coolest tanks," you're not gonna win friends and influence people, exactly.
The thing about a symbol is that it doesn't matter what the ACTUAL historical use of it was. It's the SYMBOLIC value independent of history that matters to folks. So, yeah, the slave ships flew the stars and stripes, but....the CBF is a symbol of slavery and oppression to many many people.
Well, it will be. Even here in Virginia, there was hesitation to having confederate flag license plates available. We had to sue.
And when we did, we won - because the law is overwhelmingly clear: License plates are issued by the government, and the government is absolutely prohibited by the First Amendment to discriminate against free speech. If Texas doesn't want to have vanity plates at all, then that's fine. But if it does, then it can't permit one group and deny another.
And I'm very proud to have the Confederate flag plates on my car right this moment. Never had any reaction that wasn't positive.
First off, I'm a Yankee. Born and raised in Philadelphia, got family who fought at Gettysburg and we still have an old Colt Navy in a display case which was actually carried at the battle.
But I lived in the south for seven years -- '96 - '03 -- which coincided with a lot of the pushes to get state flags and such changed. I lived in Tennessee (well, Nashville...) and Georgia (well, Atlanta...). From my experience there, from what I can tell......this **** is COMPLICATED.
I mean, on the one hand, you absolutely have people who equate the CBF with slavery. And I understand that perspective. While the historical reality may be that the CBF wasn't even the actual flag of the Confederacy, and while you can dissect the root causes of the war as being about slavery vs. states rights vs. whatever, the bottom line is that the CBF has been adopted by racist groups as a symbol of racism precisely because of its association with slavery and slave owners. And that's some pretty serious stuff.
On the other hand, the typical 3rd grade history lesson version of the Civil War ("The war was fought to free the slaves, and the good guys in blue won.") is, well...incomplete to say the least. Not to mention stupidly simplistic. Certainly southerners view the story a lot differently, and not even from a unified perspective. Sure, some of them are racist pricks, but hey, some northerners are racist pricks, too. But others may think that slavery was an abomination, while simultaneously loathing the tactics practiced by Sherman and his troops, for example. Or they may look back on southern gentility as a better time and way of life, which was extinguished by invading northerners.
Or they may just be proud of their family's heritage the same way my family is proud of its heritage as evidenced by that Colt Navy in the display case. The big difference is, nobody's taking an eraser to MY family's history to try to "edit out the sad parts." I think that's a big part of this that northerners often miss -- try to imagine people erasing aspects of your family's history because the SYMBOLS involved in it offend someone else whom you've never met and know nothing about. I mean, if anyone's gonna do some creative family history editing...shouldn't that be up to YOU? This is why I think these issues get really really complicated really really fast, and while it's easy to simply paint with a broad brush and say "Rubbish! The South was evil, had slaves, and the CBF is a symbol of HATE! ERASE IT!! REMOVE IT!! BANISH IT!!", you're talking about more than just abstract history in a book (which is bad enough to erase, by the way). You're talking about people's families and lives and, to a certain extent, their identities.
Or, in this case, you're talking about a crass marketing decision to sell more toys.
