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| Charlie Daniels |
Reposted from Charlie Daniels Soap Box - The recent senseless act of slaughter in a church in Charleston,
South Carolina awakened America to the ever present lunacy and evil that
walks among us and has also reopened some old wounds and deep feelings
on both sides of a long festering situation.
Before I go any
farther with this piece, I wish to express my love and admiration for
the people of Charleston who have, in the face of immense pain, shown a
restraint and a common sense seldom seen in tragic situations involving
race.
When I saw the pictures of the people who had been murdered
I made the statement, "I know these people", which I didn't mean
literally, but figuratively, in that they were the kind of Christian
people I have been around all my life, worked with and sat in the pews
of churches with.
Salt of the earth folks, who not only professed
to know the Lord Jesus Christ, but lived their faith every day of their
lives. The kind of people you want to have praying for you, the kind
who know how to put their arms around a hurting person and comfort and
console.
The kind of people who raised their families to turn to
Almighty God in times of trouble and heartbreak, proven by the forgiving
words spoken by family members in court to the monster who had wantonly
murdered their loved ones.
As in all Satan inspired iniquity,
God has the ability to bring great good and in this situation, the
people of Charleston South Carolina have shown the world what being a
Christian is all about and the depth of common sense and class that
exists in that community.
I feel sure that a jury of peers in
South Carolina will see that Dylann Roof gets what’s coming to him and
justice will be served and meted out to the full extent of the law.
In relation to the main crux of my column today I would like to relate
an experience I had in a Midwestern city when the band was appearing
with the local symphony orchestra. In the evening before the show
started, one of the venue staff came to me and said, "There is a
gentleman out front who is offended by the confederate flag on your
piano".
I responded that we didn't have a Confederate flag painted on our piano. The upshot of the whole thing was that Taz, our keyboard player, had an
American flag and a Tennessee flag with the flagstaffs crossed on the
front of his piano with a drawing of his namesake, a cartoon Tasmanian
Devil, and the phrase "Yessiree, Tennessee" painted under it.
The
point I'm making is that this gentleman was probably the kind of person
who looks for something to be offended about and sees things that
aren't even there in an attempt to find something. Of course the
situation concerning the Confederate flag in Charleston is a much more
serious situation with justifiable feelings that go back a century and a
half, and the problem has the potential to be a racially divisive one.
The bottom line is that the flag in question represents one thing to some people and another thing to others. Far be it from me to advise the people of South Carolina or any other
state as to what they should fly over their capitol buildings or
anywhere else in the state for that matter, but I truly hate to see the
opportunists move in and create a symbol of hate out of a simple piece
of cloth.
Of course we know most politicians are going to chime
in and glean whatever political hay that is available, but, in my book,
the corporate rush to rid their shelves of anything with the Confederate
battle flag on it is pure hypocrisy.
If they felt that deeply
about the subject, they should have done something years ago and I
notice they have no problem accepting the profits from the merchandise
they have on hand. I have received many requests to do interviews
on this subject and had a lot of tweets asking me to comment, but I
declined, wanting to take the time to explain my feelings in detail,
without having to answer other people's loaded questions or express
myself in 140-character limit of Twitter.
This will have the
potential to be lengthy, so bear with me and I will try my best to
relate my honest feelings on the Confederate flag in question which was
actually the battle flag carried by several Confederate army regiments,
and not the official flag of the Confederacy.
I was born in 1936,
a mere 71 years after the Civil War ended when the South was looked
upon by what seemed to be a majority of the Northern States as an
inbred, backward, uneducated, slow-talking and slower-thinking people,
with low morals and a propensity for incest.
This was in the days
before television and about all the folks up North knew about
Southerners was what they heard and there were a lot of people who took
great pleasure in proliferating the myth, and some still do it to this
day. As you might suppose, people in the South bitterly resented
this attitude of superiority and in some quarters the words “damn” and
“Yankee” became one word and a somewhat fierce type of Southern pride
came into being. The Confederate battle flag was a sign of
defiance, a sign of pride, a declaration of a geographical area that you
were proud to be from. That’s all it is to me and all it ever has ever been to me.
I can’t speak for all, but I know in my heart that most Southerners feel the same way. I have no desire to reinstate the Confederacy, I oppose slavery as
vehemently as any man and I believe that every human being, regardless
of the color of their skin is just as valuable as I am and deserves the
exact same rights and advantages as I do.
I feel that this
controversy desperately needs to be settled without federal interference
and input from race baiters like Al Sharpton, that it's up to the
individual states as to what they allow to be a part of their public
image, what the majority of the people of any given state want should,
in my opinion, be their policy.
Unfortunately, the Confederate
battle flag has been adopted by hate groups - and individuals like
Dylann Roof - to supposedly represent them and their hateful view of the
races. Please believe me when I say that, to the overwhelming
majority of Southerners, the flag represents no such thing, but is
simply a banner denoting an area of the nation and one's pride in living
there. I know there will be those who will take these words of
mine, try to twist them or call them insincere and try to make what I've
said here some kind of anti-black racial statement, but I tell
everybody who reads this article, I came up in the days of cruel racial
prejudice and Jim Crow laws, when the courts were tilted against any
black man, the segregated educational system was inferior and
opportunities for blacks to advance were almost nonexistent.
I
lived through the useless cruelty of those days and did not get my
feelings out of some sensitivity class or social studies course, but
made my own decisions out of experience and disgust. I hold no
ill feelings and have no axes to grind with my brothers and sisters of
any color. The same God made us, the same God will judge us, and I pray
that He will intervene in the deep racial divide we have in this nation
and make each person – black or white - see each other for what we truly
are, human beings, no better, no worse.
It's time to do away with labels, Caucasian-American, African-American, Asian-American, Native American and so forth. How about just a simple "AMERICAN"?
What do you think?
Pray for our troops and the peace of Jerusalem. God Bless America.
Charlie Daniels
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