1 Boring Old Man

I always wondered what it would have felt like to have a cross burned in my front yard by hooded men. My mother told a story of that happening at her house when she was small because my grandfather who had joined the Klan as a young man quit when he found out what it was. I think I got a small taste of how it must have felt this week. On Monday [MLK Day], I drove down Main Street of our small North Georgia town, and the Courthouse was covered with several hundred small pink and blue flags and several signs. One sign said 44 MILLION BABIES MURDERED. Another said 400 BABIES KILLED EVERY DAY. I didn’t have a camera with me, but I stopped and picked up a couple of flags:

On Tuesday [Inauguration Day], County Court was in session. When I drove by, the signs were gone, but the flags were still there [minus a couple now in my private collection].

I spent the last three days savoring the celebrations in Washington, glued to my television set. Like many, I cried through a lot of it. Obama’s speech was complex. My wife and friend who I watched with were disappointed with the absence of sound bytes of the FDR or JFK variety. His task, I thought, was different from theirs. Rereading it, I was awed at his eloquence and clarity. It was a speech for the ages after all.

But this morning, I woke up and saw the flags sitting on the counter, and realized that they’d put a bit of a damper on the whole thing for me. While the sentiment isn’t racist, they were put there in defiance of the events in Washington. I’m sure of that. They reminded me of the Cross burnings, and the fact that the now obsolete Georgia flag [with the Confederate Battle flag embedded] is the only flag displayed in local parades. They brought to mind the "forget hell" bumper stickers with a rebel flag.

I’m from fifty miles north of here. My mother was raised fifty miles to the west. I understand the sentiment being expressed by these flags. It’s a defiance that’s as old as the settlement of this land by white immigrants fleeing oppression and prejudice, even though a whole nation of Cherokee were forcibly removed to give them a place. It’s the sentiment of the Israelis who cannot understand why we also empathize with the plight of the Palestinians. At other times, these flags express a morality, or a religious view, but this week, they mainly say "No! This is our place, this is our way, and we won’t change."

Back in the mid-eighties, there was another county like ours – barely outside of the ring of Metro Atlanta. It was an openly racist place. In the early 20th century there was an alledged inter-racial rape case. Over night, all african Americans in the county were removed from their homes and expelled from the county forever. Around 1984, a young school teacher organized a small parade for MLK day. It turned into a riot. The next week, Hosea Williams took two buses to the county for a march. That turned into a riot. The next week, 20,000 Atlantans including our family [14 year old daughter at her first "march"] loaded on buses and showed the county what a real march looked like. When it was over, we were stranded there and harassed by trucks with rebel flags  and people twirling chains until being rescued by the State Patrol. That place is now a teeming suburb of Atlanta covered with subdivisions. The bridge where we were harassed twenty-five years ago now connects two shopping centers, rather than two empty fields.