Slaveowners’ holiday
Happy…Confederate Memorial Day?
South Carolina state government offices are closed Monday to mark Confederate Memorial Day.
Really. State government is on holiday to commemorate treason in defense of slavery. Cool that it’s the same state that is denying its citizens federal unemployment benefits because the state wants to force them to work in hotels and restaurants for shit pay in shit conditions…which is not as unlike slavery as it might be. It likely affects the same category of people, too.
South Carolina is among a handful of states in the South with such an official holiday. State offices in Alabama and Mississippi closed for their Confederate Memorial Days late last month.
Aka the Deep South aka the cotton belt.
We had our version of Confederate Memorial Day in Alabama last month. There is also a holiday for Jefferson Davis’ birthday, and the Martin Luther King birthday holiday is joint with Robert E Lee’s birthday.
For such an important “holiday” here in SC, all I can tell is that the DMV is closed. Which has probably led to some people today trying to get their license renewed and wondering why the hell the DMV is closed.
And quite a few government offices don’t close at all on “Confederate Memorial Day” and take the so-called holiday and move it on the holiday calendar to the July 4th week. So … a very sacred day indeed.
I agree, though, it’s a dumb excuse for a holiday. And I think most of the state would be satisfied if no one ever brought it up again and we just changed it to “Let’s make sure everyone can take a long weekend for the fourth of July Day”.
Every time I think my state is the craziest one in the union on some of these matters, there y’all go in Alabama and Mississippi one-upping us.
ARC, when I was working in Oklahoma, we had a saying: “Thank God for Mississippi”. We could always count on them to score lower than us on most measures of human well-being. I used to compare my salary to the same position in Arkansas so I would feel better about my salary; then public servants in Arkansas started making more than I was, so that avenue of personal fulfillment closed to me.
In Nebraska, who knows? They don’t compare themselves to others, because they can’t stand finding out they aren’t the best.
But at least we don’t have a Confederate Memorial Day. With all the Confederate flags that fly around here, you’d think Nebraska had been a southern state.
Mississippi is kind of generally viewed as the top worst of them all, I think, and the Delta as the worst of Mississippi. It’s not an accident that the blues are a Delta thing.
Mississippi is Parchman Farm, and Emmett Till, and Chaney Schwerner and Goodman, and Medgar Evers, and perennial bottom of the ranks for all kinds of index of well-being items.
This wasn’t true so much in the past, but the flag has become quite a bit less popular in this state over the past decade. Finally took the damned thing off the state house in 2015, and it’s actually pretty rare to see someone flying one. Not to say that no one does (I know of two jackasses with them flying in their yards along the route I take to Charlotte, though one of them is technically in North Carolina … and there are some dumbasses with Dukes of Hazzard license plates and some flag stickers) … but it’s far, far less common now than when I was a kid.
The Gadsden flag is the one popular now with the set that would have had the confederate battle flag a decade ago.
Now, speaking of North Carolina: We were driving through a town called Benson some years back when this was going on: https://bensonmuledays.com/ I have never before or since seen a greater number of confederate battle flags in one place. There was an entire processional of them, mostly on pickups and motorcycles. Hundreds. I remember turning to my wife and saying “What the hell? Did we just drive into the Racist State Fair?” Hopefully they’ve cleaned up their act since then, but who knows. Never drove through again.
Ah yes, the good old Kansas-Nebraska Compromise!
ARC, when I was in Oklahoma, you would not have seen much in Confederate flags; in fact the only one I ever saw was the one my brother had – and his patches, and his bumper stickers, and his license plate holder…
But by the time I left in 2006, they were starting to become common.
The new Civil War approaches. I LIKE the flags. They make it easy to avoid the mf’ers who fly them.
sadly, the flag that is becoming more…problematical…is the good ol Stars and Stripes. for those not REALLY into the mire, but still crazy right wingers, the bigger the better flag is critical. The “Recall Newsome” tools, for example, all seem to have huge flags. My level of “patriotism” is approaching my degree of Christian faith, I fear.
Re #4
There is the same saying in Alabama. I am told that Mississippi people have a saying “Thank God for Alabama”.
I bet it doesn’t work the same way though.
The point is that Alabama and Mississippi are often vying for the worst ranking in various things. Often enough they are not the worst and Alabama is. I don’t keep score, but it happens.
One example: I’ve been following a list of states ranked by percent of the population fully vaccinated. Alabama and Mississippi have been trading places at the bottom for weeks.
So Mississippi gets plenty of opportunities to thank amendment for keeping Mississippi out of last place.
Interesting.
Like most of the confederate monuments, the display of the confederate army flag became normal after the 2nd World War. It is an aggressive reassertion of an historical lie. I’ve seen a list of when various state flags were chosen to include over confederate symbols. It is NOT from the 19th century.