Facebook, my Door to WTF

--by Mike Adams

Alright now, this post might upset someone, but sometimes, you gotta scramble a few egg heads if you're gonna promote reasonable-thought.

I just read an entertaining and ...hmmm, scathing blog post by Erin Gloria Ryan on Jezebel called, "Banning Confederate Flag Dress-Wearing Teen From Prom Was Totally Unfair, Y'all". I have never read Jezebel before today, but I'll be back.

I found this article, because a Facebook friend posted a link to another great Jezabel post, "A Complete Guide to 'Hipster Racism'" by Lindy West.

After reading West's post, I followed a link at the bottom to Ryan's and if Erin Ryan and Lindy West are indicative of the kind of writing that is normal on Jezebel, I'll be checking in more often. I am left to wonder where has my Jezebel been for all these years?

Anyway, back to the topic of race and Confederate flags. I am half Native American, a term that growing numbers of Caucasians dislike, because from their perspective, we aren't native, we walked here and settled the land...you know across the ice bridge 20,000 years ago. So anyway, the argument goes that the term Native American isn't accurate and should be changed.

Well I suppose I have to concede the point that Native American lacks total accuracy, but hey this is America...Is Football an accurate term? What about white people...are they really white? Seriously, and in all honesty, are we actually preoccupied with concise communication as a country?

Anyway, I don't want to get too far off topic with that tangent. I don't actually write or talk about race very often, in fact it isn't a big topic in my life at all. I am half NATIVE AMERICAN, but I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Which is the home of the Atomic Bomb (I'm not making this up). My parents bought me a $2000 LASER when I was in High School and let me setup a holographic lab setup in my garage. (Seriously, I'm not making this up). What I'm getting at is that I kind of grew up as a white kid...a nerdy white kid, with brown skin.

So while someone in my life has probably been prejudiced against me based on race, it never occurred to me that I might have been discriminated against, rather I've had the experience, on many occasions, of dealing with complete idiots. The bottom line is that I go through life asserting white male privilege and I get away with it.

I promise, this does eventually tie in with wearing a prom dress made out of a confederate flag...just bear with me, I'll get there.

But first, I feel it is important to remind everyone that the confederate flag was the rallying point, the symbolic inspiration for an army of US citizens who rose up and waged open war against the United States of America. It is true that confederate troops received full pardons after the war, but that does not take away from the fact that they were pardoned ...for TREASON.

Beyond even that, however, it is important to remember that the Confederacy was not only a group of people engaged in open treason. The Confederacy and the confederate flag represent the legalized tyranny of slavery. The systematic oppression of a whole group of people, based on their skin color.

The Confederacy and it's flag represent hooded terrorists arriving in the dead of night to lynch a man for daring to demand his rights.

The confederate flag represents one of the worst forms of slavery that human kind has ever seen. A form of slavery that institutionalized racism and legally defined a human being as less than human.

So yes, like the Nazi Swastika, the Confederate flag is offensive. So for those who want to, you can wear it on your clothing or put it on your car. In the United States of America, you have that right and I support your right. However, your freedom to display or wear symbols of tyranny do not protect you from being pointed out and ridiculed as an idiot and an ass-hole. So if you are going to assert your right to freedom of speech, you might want to check and see if what you have to say is worthy of speaking, because if you're just being a moron, my freedom of speech allows me to laugh at you and call you a moron, which I will do as best I can.