What's Goin' On ... In Memphis

(Post and comment edited from Facebook)   When the civil rights movement was just getting underway, people said blacks in America just wanted to take their rightful place in society and culture, to take a place at the table that they'd always been denied. Because Americans are basically a fair-minded people, the country agreed that black folks (and women and other minorities) had been denied and it was time to include them.

(The "massive resistance" to desegregation during this period that you sometimes hear about from flogger types and others appears massive when it's the only thing in their camera frame. In most schools, in most counties and municipalities in the South, there was minor to zero resistance and trouble from white students and their parents. You didn't see this on TV at the time, or see it repeated over and over to this day, a la Little Rock, because it is of limited to no use in demonizing white Southerners.)

Well, we saw almost immediately that it wasn't really about adding a leaf to make more room at the table, and pulling up another chair and adding some new dishes to the existing menu. For leftist leaders and culture changers, the civil rights movement was an opportunity to do what they'd always wanted -- to get rid of what was already there and replace it with something else. Not just the food, but the china and silverware ... and the people. They hated what was already there, and the people who had put it there. For them, it was about force... about using the power of government and the courts and the media to force people already at the table get up, give up their chair and their meal...

What's going on in Memphis is NOT about honoring Ida B. Wells -- they could name a new park for her; a new school, a new street, a new anything, if honoring her was the genuine motivation. But it isn't. Getting rid of Nathan Bedford Forrest is the genuine motivation.

In the early 2000s, the campaign to eradicate the Confederate battle flag from public property (starting in South Carolina) included the rhetoric, "We don't care what you do on private property; it is the putting the flag on public property that we object to." So, down the flag came from state houses and other public buildings and from historic flag displays like the one in my town. And up it went on private property.

Well, just listen to the teeth-gnashing and the howls and screeches of protest when large Confederate flags go up on private property beside interstate highways in the South. Look at the treatment that Annie Caddell in S.C. got for putting up a flag **in her own yard.** "We don't care what you do on private property," was obviously yet another Big Lie.

But the privatization of very visible Confederate commemoration has to be done --  massively. If the park is renamed in Memphis, a very large, visible and beautiful new park must be created on private property to honor Forrest. His remains should be moved there and given a magnificent memorial.

And then, Memphis needs to be put under a microscope and monitored constantly, to see how changing the name of the park  "improves" the "quality of life" in that city.

Very, very visible positive reminders of the Confederacy -- and many more of them - must be maintained on private property to counter and neutralize, as much as possible, the ongoing efforts to dishonor and remove reminders of it from publicly owned places. The effort to erase all reminders of the Confederacy from the national consciousness, and all artifacts of it from the Southern landscape must not be allowed to succeed.

See a Facebook responder's comment below videos.

Memphis, Tennessee Elvis Presley

Walking In Memphis Marc Cohn

Communists founded and ran (and still run) the so-called civil rights movement. They did it because they knew that the black community was a perfect lever to "divide and conquer" in this country.

Now, having said that, I believe we must recognize that there was plenty wrong prior to the movement and that if good men of all colors could have come together and worked to do the right thing, the commies never would have had their opportunity -- but we didn't and they did.

Again, having said that, the time has come to stop the eternal effort to use the past as a means of a minority (not just in race but in political ideology) to destroy the rights of the majority (and not just in race). Yes, things were wrong and yes, we failed to act to make them right thus giving an opportunity to our enemies -- who, by the way, are as much an enemy of the black man -- to create what we now have in this country, rule by political correctness. But, sadly, it would seem as if the commies have won. 

So it would appear.

After World War II, when victorious GIs returned home, using technology, methods and inventions developed during the war, they built a new peacetime prosperity for the common folk never before seen in history. They built entire neighborhoods in the suburbs filled with little ranch houses with backyard barbecues and two car garages (with two cars in them) and network of streets and roads connecting them to suburban shopping centers and jobs in the cities. The San Fernando Valley epitomizes that culture.

But there were people who hated the prosperity and optimism of the era and began the job of tearing it down. They would love nothing more than to see the San Fernando Valley and its mirrors across the country turn into third world hell holes. In no small part due to their efforts, the Fabulous Fifties gave way to the Sick Sixties, and the country's and culture's decline has been steady ever since.  The civil rights movement was right in the middle of the decline because, as we now know, a great many blacks have not benefited from that effort, because it was as much about tearing down the "white man's world" as it was about elevating blacks. Ditto the feminism movement, which was less about helping and protecting women and more about hating and getting even with men.

The logical conclusion of the civil rights movement sits in the White House in Washington, D.C.  Barack Hussein Obama's economic jihad on the U.S. economy will finish off the country...  But nobody is going to like what results, not even the people who think that's what they want.  We'll all feel the regret GloZell felt after Obama's first election -- but for very different reasons.

Goodbye, Memphis. Goodbye, America.


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Image Credits: Columbia and Pensacola photos by C. Ward. Forrest Memorial photo by Thomas R. Machnitzki, Creative Common License. Confederate Flag in Tampa  photo found online unattributed.