The Confederacy was a con job on whites. And still is.
By Frank HymanI’ve lived 55 years in the South, and I grew up liking the Confederate flag. I haven’t flown one for many decades, but for a reason that might surprise you.
I know the South well. We lived wherever the Marine Corps stationed my father: Georgia, Virginia, the Carolinas. As a child, my favorite uncle wasn’t in the military, but he did pack a .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun in his trunk. He was a leader in the Ku Klux Klan. Despite my role models, as a kid I was an inept racist. I got in trouble once in the first grade for calling a classmate the N-word. But he was Hispanic.
As I grew up and acquired the strange sensation called empathy (strange for boys anyway), I learned that for black folks the flutter of that flag felt like a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. And for the most prideful flag waivers, clearly that response was the point. I mean, come on. It’s a battle flag.
What the flag symbolizes for blacks is enough reason to take it down. But there’s another reason that white southerners shouldn’t fly it. Or sport it on our state-issued license plates as some do here in North Carolina. The Confederacy – and the slavery that spawned it – was also one big con job on the Southern, white, working class. A con job funded by some of the ante-bellum one-per-centers, that continues today in a similar form.
Read more: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/opinion/article136803208.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
People talk about the Civil War and say that it was a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. But aren't they all? Look at our history and the war profiteers. Some of the profiteers have been in the highest offices in the land. Poor people risk life and limbs to make mountains of cash for the wealthy. And they say nowadays, 'Well, we have a volunteer army. They know what they're getting into.'
But, it is OK. War is what we do best. We invest more blood and treasure in making war more than any other single effort. Making war is as much of being human as poetry, art or music.
If we don't have an external enemy, we will make one. If we can't make a convenient external enemy, we will split up and fight among ourselves. It is the fatal flaw in our species, it is who we are and it what will be the end of us. The funny thing is, is that we are so damned arrogant, we don't realize that the rest of the universe and the rest of time will never know we were ever here.
Now that I have got that out of my system, I think I will go kick my neighbors ass. 
The Confederate flag license plates fall into that category. 