Memorial Day, 2026

 Today we honor the valiant service members throughout our history who believed that the supreme sacrifice of their lives was a price worth paying to bring about a better world.

The world is indeed becoming a better place. Progress is slow and uneven. It is halted by ethnocentrism, greed, and ego in some places, while surging forward in others. Overall the ideals of human rights remain a beacon.

The United States as currently led has declined to take part in this better world. Our current leadership might as well be pissing on the graves of fallen heroes rather than laying wreaths. They view the military as expendable labor, a cost of doing business. And they're poor, wasteful  businessmen.

If we let the trend continue, every person who died from the Revolutionary War onward wasted their death. We don't honor the equality defined in the Declaration of Independence. We don't have a secular government allowing free expression, latitude for all faiths, and a free and inquisitive press. Current leadership seeks to rescind constitutional amendments that don't fit their view of the hierarchy that favors them. 

The massive casualties of the Civil War occupy acres and acres that could be turned into golf resorts for all that their courage matters now. Because the civil rights movement continued to press the issues of the Civil War against the tactics that replaced outright slavery, their casualties deserve to be remembered alongside the official war dead. And the current policies at the federal and state level continue the theme of erasing their gains.

Every war is supposed to push us closer to a time when we no longer need to send people out to give up everything else that they might ever have been and done. Every war fails us in that regard, because too many of us focus on the heroism and fighting skill, and not enough on what those people were fighting for: not to have to do this again.

Humans are a deeply flawed species. Various leaders will continue to rise and believe that they can conquer the world, or at least a good chunk of it. We will always have a need for heroes who will hold their ground and say no. Remember this: all that is required for good to triumph is for evil people to do nothing. You pick a side every day, multiple times a day. Which side are you on?

The technology of mechanized slaughter becomes ever more impersonal and heinous. There was never much glory in the mass murder contests we've conducted though the millennia, but there's ever less in the ways in which we can obliterate whole swaths of each other without even looking closely. And once a year we grow briefly solemn and say a few words before going to our various barbecues, weather permitting.

We're rapidly approaching the "or die" part

 As the current regime sprints toward totalitarian control, its agents have seized and detained legal permanent residents as well as immigrants and visitors either with visa issues or simply suspected of them. Plane loads of people have been sent to prison in El Salvador without due process. Citizens of other countries have been held in ICE facilities and US prisons without explanation, or with flimsy ones.

The wrecking crew of DOGE continues to demolish the professional portions of government agencies, while executive orders illegally halt funding to entities that the regime considers a threat to their authority. In other words, the Bill of Rights is being canceled. As long as white supremacists can say ignorant things, and no one comes for the guns (yet), the mainstream media and the loudest voices on the Internet insist that everything is fine. Freedom of speech and the right to bear arms are the only things that matter to people who specialize in hurtful speech and violence.

Major corporations and even law firms roll over for the advancing dictatorship.

The connect the dots diagram of the Turd Reich takes ever more obvious shape while legal remedies bog down in the courts. Protests gather. The regime ignores both. Once a person has been disappeared, they're hard to bring back. Gone is gone. So the regime can continue to sweep up people while the opposition fumbles for a response.

When situations like this in the past finally led to war, the "bad guys" always scored early victories. The Confederacy won all of the early battles of the Civil War. Germany and its allies entrenched themselves across Europe in World War I. Most dramatically, in World War II, the Axis powers took control of Europe, and the Japanese took control of most of the the Pacific, and required years of bloodshed to dislodge.

War has changed since the Second World War. It's unlikely that the major nuclear armed powers would unleash the full murder-suicide firestorm of a full exchange. But there could be limited strikes, and plenty of drones and conventional munitions that can kill lots of small, squishy humans thoroughly enough.

Meanwhile, on North America, the budding fascist regime in Washington envisions the empire that the enslavers imagined when they launched the Civil War: white supremacy from Cape Horn in Chile to Nunavut, Canada. Maybe they haven't thought it through that far, but I'll bet that someone at the Heritage Foundation has.

The problems with that come down to personnel. There simply aren't enough white people to dominate all of the non-white people that stand in the way of that fever dream. Enthusiastic breeders are doing their best, but it's not going to be enough.

Marjorie Taylor Greene called for a "national divorce" in 2023. She suggested that the country divide up by red and blue states. Various ideologically fractured maps of the United States have circulated for years. Because the United States itself was formed by carving out territory and choosing an ideology for it, the idea seems feasible. However it ignores factors that made the American experiment possible in its day. Everything took longer. Distance mattered more. And the abundant resources of the land area funded the independent existence of the country in a way that would be nearly impossible to duplicate. This is especially true if those resources are divided up among hostile smaller countries carved out of the corpse of the once-great nation.

The opposition to the Lands of the Free -- formerly the singular Land of the Free -- are unified groups under Russian and Chinese control. Both of those countries and their client states make no pretense of valuing the individual lives of their citizens or offering them much in the way of freedom. And their citizens are accustomed to this. Guided by fatalism, they go along, get along. Large numbers may be expended in military and industrial actions that their governments choose. They may not like it, but they can't imagine life any other way. With the United States gone, the last beacon of hope goes out.

If the United States holds together as a fascist state for the sake of the survival of its brand name without any of the signature freedom and democracy that had made it attractive to free thinkers the world over, it might hold its place in the uneasy triangle of hostile posturing that would shape reality for the generations born into it. If the country breaks up into little countries, each defining freedom in their own way, all of those countries will face diplomatic pressures from Russia and China. Each one will have to fund and equip its defenses and manage its economy. Each in turn will be easily picked off by the unified forces of the larger powers, no matter how unhappy the citizens of those powers might be. The self-proclaimed "free" will most likely be the ones doing the bulk of the dying.

Efforts to oppose the regime now might succeed. Some opponents of the current fascist coup will probably die. Some in custody probably already have. That death toll is nothing compared to what will happen if the situation here festers into actual revolution. And breaking into smaller nations will inevitably lead to either the end of freedom in them or their eradication.

Freedom for all ultimately comes down to mutual consent. We decide that we want that, as a species. Anything short of that sets the stage for endless war and the ultimate defeat of freedom as a concept at all. It ends either with the victors marching in lockstep to whatever goals their leaders assign, or everyone gone. As long as we're willing to kill each other, killers will always win. Maybe they're the "good killers." Maybe they're the "bad killers." In either case, the dead are still dead. The murderer always gets away with the crime, because the victim is still dead even if the perpetrator stands trial.

War is expensive

 The current regime courted voters by claiming that they would bring down prices for ordinary citizens who felt overly burdened by price and availability problems with some items. They also characterized the party they ran against as warmongers likely to plunge us into World war III.

We've been on the verge of World War III for my entire life. The sense of doom hung over us before I was born and persists today. It takes its place beside the fear of Hell and the fear of public embarrassment as leverage that social leaders use on the masses. It's a good one, too.

The regime started a trade war immediately, billing it as a good economic move. It's not, of course. Tariff costs are passed directly to the consumers, whether the company they're dealing with is directly affected or not. Prices rising anywhere is an invitation to prices rising everywhere. Also, everything really is connected, so what seems unaffected can't really remain untouched. This is especially true with the new tariffs announced on aluminum and steel. These basic structural metals are in everything, more or less.

As costs rise here, civilians are paying the costs of leadership's insistence on hostilities. Meanwhile, civilians in targeted foreign countries are paying the costs of their leadership's retaliatory tariffs. It's always the common people who pay the highest price for any form of war. And if your politics are based in anger, you will have war.

Americans get nostalgic for World War II because all of the major destruction took place somewhere else. This country was the ultimate home front. Popular music continued to evolve and advance. Sure, there was rationing, and people lost loved ones, but the economy hummed along with war production. Everyone had a sense of shared purpose. They could ignore peripheral costs to the planet and the future, like the prodigious amounts of petroleum dumped into the oceans as warring forces sank ships full of oil, and chemical fires raged in bombed industrial and urban centers in Europe. Gotta get through this awful war. The citizens went without things. Their freedom of movement was restricted at least by fuel rationing, if not by little inconveniences like being thrown into an internment camp for the duration.

By the end of the war, the dawning Atomic Age pointed a charred, bony finger toward the threat of what a future conflict would bring. The Atomic Age melted into the Nuclear Age within a few years, raising the temperature of the fireball even higher. You want this? Do you? Bitch about the Boomers all you want, but that generation was raised with unprecedented levels of indulgence alongside the assurance that the grownups were going to start something any day to incinerate it.

Here we are today, in a trade war that shows no signs of slackening. Inflation is climbing when we were assured that it would snap off like a light switch. At the same time, the executive branch is yanking us out of alliances that were forged in that glorious shared struggle of World War II and its aftermath, and declaring its intention to destabilize the Middle East, annex the territory of allies, and do it all with a military force composed exclusively of white, straight men, apparently. 

It would take a lot to get nations chucking nukes at each other, but maybe not as much as you think. People with their finger on the trigger came close to making the mistake numerous times during the Cold War. Would the US have dropped its cute little atomic bombs on Japan if any belligerent country had the potential to retaliate? However, a hostile stance leads to skirmishes that can lead to battles that can lead to ground wars that can be used to pit Oceania against Eurasia or Eastasia in a perpetual struggle that might not even really exist except for the poor conscripted idiots sent off to provide the verification of their mutilated or dead bodies.

Cynics would say that we have had that for years. If true in any way, it has only been in its infant stages. The desire to control territory and expand regional influence is real. In the full 1984 version, the wars are more of an endless stalemate welcomed by the authorities controlling each entity. Maybe one day a single power might prevail, but in the meantime the stalemate served the top tier quite well.

If you finished the book, though, the spokesperson for the top tier of Oceania, O'Brien, admits that even the top tier has to live with less than the best that a person could have, for the sake of loyalty to The Party that keeps them on top. Orwell doesn't go into a lot about tax policy, but the diminished returns that the leaders of the party accept is a tax of sorts.

Anyway, here, today, we're closer to that than ever, but still not doomed. Unfortunately, the Republican Party has been so completely intoxicated by fringe legal theories and completely unconstitutional fantasies of a better government run by crazy rich people that their congressional delegation is doing absolutely nothing to exert their powers to check the executive branch. Between the ones who see benefit to themselves and the ones who never understood their constitutional responsibilities in the first place, power is in the hands of a slim but potent majority utterly unqualified to hold it.

That's the thing about representative democracy: if one party wanted to put up a sewer rat as a candidate and could convince enough voters to put that rat in office, we would have a sewer rat in office. The founders of this country anticipated incompetents and scoundrels, but never in such overwhelming force. So now we have to convince the party that grew its power by appealing to greed, lack of civic education, paranoia, and exclusionary religiosity to "do the right thing" and save the constitution from this onslaught.

The judicial branch is trying, only to provoke public statements from high ranking Republicans challenging their authority to do so. It's in that constitution that you people like to put on stickers in the back window of your enormous pickup trucks. The judicial branch can rule, but it can't enforce. Congress has to agree and refuse to cooperate further with the destruction.

Most Americans don't really understand what they could lose. American to them means white American, and white Americans have never lost anything. Sure, the South suffered a little reorganization in the Civil War, but they bounced back. Aggrieved citizens of a paler hue can claim that they were passed over for plum jobs because of various quotas, but in general we're used to having things our way. Almost none of us have put it together that the reason things aren't going as well as they might for us emanates from corporate boardrooms and the financial sector. The corruption of the government is just a byproduct of that abandonment of the middle class by the private sector. The top tier of wealth has reasoned -- rightly or wrongly -- that they don't need a thriving middle class and upward mobility in this country. They're sick of paying for it. They quit chipping in a while ago. They've had us fighting each other for decades.

There's a slim chance that the voters who put Republicans into congressional seats can bury them in phone calls, emails, letters, and social media posts to convince them that their political future lies not in cooperating with this regime but in asserting their power to stop it. There's a slimmer chance that mass public protests will do much more than cost their participants the money and time it took to participate. Those costs could be pretty steep in some cases. Remember the phrase "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor" as you choose your side and take action. No one gives a shit about honor anymore, but lives and fortunes carry plenty of weight. It's our lives and piddly fortunes versus theirs. They have massively greater fortunes, but only a few lives.

Doesn't just voting seem a lot easier than plunging into the physical conflict or submission to dictatorship that will proceed unchecked? Support the government employees who are resisting DOGE. Pressure congress to support the judges who are supporting the Constitution. Refuse to comply.

How it gets worse before it maybe gets better

 Democratic Congressional representatives are getting a lot of advice from political strategists and voters about whether to cooperate with the Republican majorities in both chambers. 

"Obstruct! Refuse to cooperate with the tools of dictatorship!" 

"Vote with them whenever possible to keep the idea of bipartisanship alive!"

You can make a case either way.  If history is any guide, we'll get a blend of both approaches. Success may look disappointing as we slog through the hard times that the new regime's policies are going to unleash on all but the richest of us, and the fortunate laborers close enough to be trickled on directly. The result will provide many anecdotes to confuse voters.

With the country's divisions referred to as Red (right wing) versus Blue (Democratic, progressive), I  predict that things will get redder before they get better. Purple states will turn completely red in the midterms, as voters there are convinced that their continued tribulations are the fault of the surviving Democrats. The Republicans have had an aggressive strategy of gerrymandering, while corporate donors and right wing think tanks have directed them to take control of state and local offices as well. The messaging is dense and widespread.

Two major factors help the Republicans to prevail. A Democrat who votes in favor of Republican bills, because they might be able to insert amendments to reduce the harm to targeted groups will lose Democratic and allied swing voters who might sit out the next election, even if they won't vote outright for Republicans. Republican-leaning swing voters will use Democratic cooperation as an excuse to vote Republican because the Democrats apparently approve of the policies anyway, so what purpose does an opposing party serve? Republicans have long championed the idea of one-party rule, as long as it is their party.

When I was young, growing up in a sane Republican household, I picked up on the fact that my parents would vote for a Democrat if that candidate had better ideas than the Republican in that particular election. Because my father worked with officials from both parties during his tours of duty in Washington, and because he was not a barking mad partisan, he would examine the policies offered by any candidate and vote accordingly. The Republican Party's degeneration turned him officially into a Democrat in his early 90s, when he finally couldn't take it anymore. 

Gone are the days when conservatives were simply people who wanted to progress at a slower pace, who needed more convincing before signing onto the proposals eagerly touted by progressives. That sort of conservative was always in the minority, but they had some influence. Maybe it was only to secure votes to advance their party's power, but they could choke it down. That's all gone now. Anyone like that has been purged from the party. Voters are encouraged to be angry, and contemptuous of anything "liberal." Politicians who want to lead them have to reflect this vitriol and fervor.

Voters ultimately have the power to shape their candidates. Gerrymandering wouldn't work if there weren't enough like-minded voters to weld together into weird-shaped voting districts in the first place. The fact that so many states have right-wing leadership reflects the depth of hostility that has been cultivated in the decades since the 1970s. Lots of factors have contributed, but the worst one was that conservative leaders in politics and business realized that the dark side has way more immediate power than the harder path to "peace, love, and understanding."

Side note here: one reason that the authoritarians are not worried that they will face a successful uprising if they stomp on our heavily armed population too hard is that the armed and dangerous folks will be fighting each other and the kooks and weirdos that they hate, not joining forces with them to tackle the real evil in the seats of power. Up in the seats of power, those folks will just watch the carnage and then hire whoever is left afterwards at subsistence wages.

Voters have the power, at least for a little while longer. It seems like the hardest challenge is to get enough of them to believe it and to want it. Casting a single vote seems undramatic and futile. Rallies and speeches stir up great emotions, but then it just comes down to marking a piece of paper and hoping that enough other  people marked their paper the same way. And after the election you have to wait for  whatever changes you wanted, while they make their way through the legislative process. All the while, a constant argument rages on all media, legacy and modern, to make you angry and doubtful.

Democratic politicians in areas with strong conservative presence face particular challenges between the ends of the political spectrum. Think of Joe Manchin. Now John Fetterman weakens the pure Democratic bloc by looking for ways to balance the pressures he had to overcome to get elected in the first place. Because the Democrats did not manage to gain a solid Congressional majority, they couldn't pile on the programs heavily enough to demonstrate to the public that their methods were undeniably delivering the improvements that voters in both parties said they wanted. Democrats are back to compromising on bills that they should have been able to reject outright. New Hampshire's delegation has similarly made hard political choices that disappoint the "resist at all cost" faction. It still may not be enough to keep them in their seats as each comes up for re-election over time.

It's discouraging to observe how social justice and acceptance of minority and difference are driven by the whims of fashion. In our local schools, our tiny handful of Black students have faced virulent racism from white fellow schoolchildren who think that it's fun and funny to say really horrible things. The little white twerps have never experienced a fully racist society. They have no way to understand all the ways in which a white supremacist society would make life worse for everyone. That doesn't matter when they are willing to add to the voices spreading that crap, making it a factor in political debate. It's the same with any prejudice. It trickles down to idiot kids who spout it to seem tough and cool. Symbols proliferate. Adults who believe similarly feel more and more comfortable spouting the horseshit and pressuring politicians to act on it.

The next couple of elections will give us some idea whether enough voters are tired of fighting about skin color and genitalia and are ready to participate in longer-term planning for the general welfare, and planetary survival.

Freedom of $peech?

If I tossed 5 or 10 bucks at every worthy cause that sent me a "fundraising alert" I could easily blow through close to $100 a day. If this is to gain political leverage over the tiny faction of the population who can afford to throw millions of dollars at Congress on a regular basis, how long can we be expected to try to beat them at their own game?

Members of congress willing to rock the gravy boat seem few in number, so I don't know how we can really get big money out of politics. Meanwhile, expecting nickel-and-dime grassroots fundraising to continue to finance political positions that go against the interests of the wealthy is like expecting your health insurance premiums not to keep surging upward. I don't know about you, but I can easily be outspent. Is that how we want to decide whose ideas get to be heard?

When stockholders vote in corporate elections, those with the most shares get to make the decisions. Any small holders have to live with that. In our government we are supposed to have equal voices, so that the points of view of all citizens are taken into account. Instead we have another shareholder meeting in which the big players tell the little people what to do.

Revolution IS called for, since we can't get enough elected officials into office to make the change using what's left of our political system. But a shooting war is a stupid gambit. Just refuse to cooperate. Ride a bike. Walk. Live on less. Detach as much as possible from the corporate-controlled economy. That may mean a pretty primitive lifestyle for quite a while -- maybe a couple of generations. But think how much more primitive and brutal life would be in a country torn by civil war.

Corporatocracy will not give up easily. Their forces may lash out. Put the moral burden on them by living inoffensively.

Our enemies would fund our civil war

A country torn by civil war can't be a power player on the international stage. Think about the countries in the last 50 years that have broken apart in that way. Their struggles might influence global policy and occupy the time of superpowers, but they themselves are not superpowers.

The term superpower was coined to describe the massive influence of the mightiest nuclear-armed nations in the second half of the 20th Century. America was the first, with its atomic bomb. As nuclear weapons technology spread, the Soviet Union became the opposing force. Alliances formed among the lesser nations to gain power by association with one superpower or the other.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was left as the last remaining superpower. For a brief few years, we could believe that we stood unopposed. Of course the nuclear arsenal still sat in readiness in the remnants of the USSR. They were no longer under a central command, but enough of them were still in Russia's hands to make a nice armageddon. Good thing no one was in  the mood at the time.

Russia reconstituted its power gradually. It was never going to lie there and give up its global ambitions. The ambitions live in the minds of human leaders, but the culture of imperialism -- no matter how re-labeled -- has centuries of heritage there.

China emerged as a power player more gradually. Its role in an actual armed conflict would probably be doggedly defensive rather than as an initial aggressor, but it can't be dismissed. Its leaders would enjoy global power as would any ambitious person. And unambitious people don't seek positions of leadership. Policy is made by dominant people.

If America gives way to its temptation to fight it out internally -- literally, with gunfire and explosions and factional killing -- China and Russia would fund and arm both sides and just sit back. America has conducted itself internationally with more pride than humility since it took its place as a real global power in the 1890s by beating up on Spain. The rest of the world might feel some sorrow at our dissolution, but also a bit of schadenfreude at the toppling of our self-constructed pedestal.

Would American business leaders really let the civil war happen? Civil wars in other countries are profitable. Let the smaller nations go up in flames and down in rubble. Good businessmen will talk about how it's in our national interest to be involved a little bit, but hold back from the wasteful extravagance of either global war or a real armed conflict on American streets. We can send a few thousand troops, and arm the combatants in these endless lesser conflicts as a way to affirm that the human species will never be peaceful and unified, while still keeping the golf courses, yacht clubs, and estates safely distant from the battle zones. But what if they can't maintain control? Lots of people are getting disgusted with the rule of the corporate elite. Who knows for sure how the official military forces might divide? Once an uprising is declared an insurrection, not just a criminal act, US armed forces can be used on home soil. Troops would have to decide where their loyalty lies.

Civil war would be a supremely bad idea. Since when has that ever stopped a determined bunch of people from marching off on a grand campaign? And on a higher level, maybe the destruction of the United States is just the next phase in evolution. It wouldn't be a failure of the principles on which the republic claimed to be founded. Those are universally available to any interested humans. If nations really are obsolete, the obliteration of this one would be merely another chapter in humanity's quarrelsome history. The principles of individual liberty and shared responsibility could still underlie any future regime more generally applied to human well-being across the planet.

I'm not saying that they would. But they could.

We are free to prevent our dissolution by growing up a little and facing the reality of the damage our species has done to the planet and each other. We can choose to start to get along with each other and look more carefully at the interdependence of all life, not just human life or of one sub-category of human life.  I'm not saying that we will. But we should. We can confound our enemies by refusing to destroy ourselves at the same time that we decline to engage in direct hostilities with them. Such a course would depend on an unprecedented level of wisdom. The only other option is to continue our uneasy paranoia for as long as we manage to keep from destroying ourselves outright. Aggressive leaders can always find recruits. Even if a majority of people don't want to be hostile to each other, a minority of motivated aggressors can always force the issue to bloodshed. That then has to be resolved before any progress can resume.

Slave owners shape our history

The yet-to-be United States declared its independence from Great Britain only after southern plantation owners were assured that all this freedom and equality would not apply to the brown people they owned or the lifestyle and economy based on slavery.

The fledgling United States needed a constitution. Southern plantation owners signed on only when assured that the slavery question would at least be pushed way down on the calendar.

In 1861 the slavery issue's heated tensions came to actual warfare. As a result of that war, slavery was abolished. Segregation and suppression continued, aided by laws and beliefs based on principles of racial inequality.

By the end of the 19th Century, a few people had amassed vast fortunes that depended largely on cheap labor and favorable legislation. While the workers were technically free and compensated for their efforts, institutions like the company store and payment in scrip were just a couple of factors contributing to income inequality, insecurity and poverty among workers. The wealthy enjoyed a very close relationship with the elected government.

During the 20th Century, American society showed some signs of improvement in the treatment of workers and minorities. By the end of the century, however, those trends were beginning to reverse. It has only become more obvious as the 21st Century has advanced. A few people control most of the money. The world is their plantation. Their purchased legislators and judges solidify their gains. Restive populations are turned on each other, told that the threat comes not from the concentration of wealth but from the differences of the people around them.

Wealth is measured in dollars. Dollars are measured in numbers. Numbers have no empathy.

Humans have emotions. They measure in feelings, and can be steered by them. In fact, they can be steered by little else. Even supposedly rational people are only rational because they like how it makes them feel.

When wealth is the ultimate good, decisions are made by the numbers to increase wealth. If a bunch of poor people have to take a hit for it, they're a necessary loss, the same as the killed or broken heroes we sent to war to defend our way of doing business. We praise you, valiant warriors. Now get lost.

The wealthy feel better when they're getting more wealth. The impersonal numbers click higher, incapable of feeling the euphoria they inspire in the humans who get to claim them. The owners control society, while the vast majority who make up that society get shoved around by forces they don't have time to understand.

If you have a fantasy of dropping out and setting up a homestead where you can live off the grid and let the whole mess of civilization fall apart, think again. You will go down fighting to defend your little chunk of arable land and potable water from the thousands of desperate people who would want a piece of it for themselves. If that sounds glorious to you, or even doable, you're an idiot.

Like all the ills of human society, the problems of economy could be solved by cooperative effort. So, like all the problems of human society, they will remain unsolved while we argue and let evolution decide for us. It's worked for millions of years. Why stop now?

Civilization was the result of evolution. The collapse of civilization can certainly be the result of further evolution. Here's the thing about evolution: it doesn't care if you live or die. It doesn't care if anything lives or dies. So if we choose to let ourselves slump into a mucky pit of industrial waste, blood and feces, evolution will log that decision and reflect those changes as impersonally as a corporate ledger shows an uptick in profits when thousands of workers are laid off.

American Stubbornness and Confederate Pride

I'm not signing any petitions demanding that the Confederate flag be removed from anywhere it currently flies. It needs to go away, but fundamental American resistance to public coercion always supersedes better judgment. Look what the South did when the federal government told them to ditch slavery. They seceded from the Union and opened fire on Fort Sumter. Reproving petitions elevate the flag issue to another Great Cause.

Southerners like to say that the war was about states' rights, but if the issue had been the right to wear green pants and a pink shirt rather than the right to own other human beings we would probably have avoided a bloody chapter in our nation's history. Note that I did not say we would have avoided an ugly chapter. Depends on the green and the pink, I guess. However, the slavery question did mesh with other aspects of the power of a federal government versus that of the states. This nicely obfuscates the basic question of racist slavery for those who wish to dance around it.

Say for argument that the Civil War had been about green pants. Say you had secession, warfare, a region of the country declaring itself a separate nation with its own flag. In due course, the Union wins the war, the South has to vary its wardrobe and the nation tries to reunify. But resentful adherents of green pants want to remember what they stood for, and how valiantly they fought. They incorporate the Green Pants banner into their state flags and keep their memories of the glorious campaign alive. In a weird way, the South was not part of the United States, and yet, having been once and future states, could they really be considered separate even for the time when they tried to break away? So their flag is sewn into our tapestry, like it or not, because to the green pants people of Dixie that was life for several years in their history. Whatever they seceded over, they came back.

Of course it wasn't about green pants. It was about an evil institution. Like most evil institutions, you can find stories from that time that are heartwarming and show kindness. But the system was not designed to warm hearts and foster kindness. It was designed to exploit a race deemed inferior, bought and sold like animals. Regardless of whether the southern states were on their way to doing away with slavery on their own, when pushed they chose to declare war rather than hurry their own emancipation bills through their various legislatures. That call to arms is quintessentially American. Don't tell me what to do or I'll tell you where to go. And I'll back it up with hot lead. People will dig in when they think someone is trying to force their hand, even if it's in a direction they were already thinking about going. And of course they weren't all thinking about going that way.

One of the hardest things to do in this day and age is wait for enough people to evolve to the point where we might all agree to do what's needed to live together peaceably on a healthy planet. But waiting and advising is all that will work. Even if you exterminated everyone who looks like trouble, if you left two people at the end there would be an argument over something, sooner than later.

Proud displays of the Confederate flag should go away, but the Confederacy can't be forgotten. The Civil War was a national tragedy that more or less ended the most obvious aspects of a national disgrace. But the official end of slavery left us with way more than four score and seven years more of racism and strife. It's been seven score and ten, so far. Remember that many abolitionists did not believe that African Americans were equal, only that they should not be owned. Once freed, the grateful darkies were supposed to nip off back to Africa to take up where they left off. They weren't supposed to assimilate into society, become educated and improve their lot. If they couldn't go away, they should at least have the decency to be well behaved. And that was the mild point of view. Where the enmity ran deeper, the hostility was virulent. While that hostility is not quite as overt and widespread now as it was a mere 60 years ago, a little is still too much, and there's way more than a little.

It will be many more years -- if ever -- before there's a national consensus on what the Confederacy was about. So many versions of any story spin up over time that it becomes impossible to untangle all the myths and legends, no matter what the subject. Its flag is a visually striking banner, brightly colored and boldly designed. Then there's the rebel yell. There's a lot to attract the merely high-spirited, not just the mean-spirited. And in a way, by taking the south back into the union, we tacitly agreed to take their heroes in the great and bloody war, who began as Americans and -- if they survived the conflict -- ended that way as well, whether they liked it or not. But you can't spend too much time reliving the details of the actual war, because that was a horrific waste of lives made necessary by stubbornness and pride. You can't go into it without acknowledging that someone was right and someone was wrong. If you tell yourself that the wrong side won, what stops you from saying we should fight again? If you admit that southern surrender was for the best, how can the war not be a complete bloody waste of lives?

The thing that seems to give humans the most trouble is figuring out when to stand up for what they believe and when to question those beliefs and abandon them. When is a fight the good fight and when is it wrong-headed and cruel? Those are decisions people have to make for themselves. You might force them to comply with your view, but if they don't agree it simply goes on the score card for later reckoning.