My Remarks to the Escambia County Commissioners

At the July 7th meeting (the section in red italics was left out so the remarks would fit in the 2-minute time limit.)

Confederates committed treason against the United States and fought to keep and entire race in bondage. This mantra, ubiquitous in the social media age, is the concoction of cultural manipulators designed to be accepted and repeated by their minions without a single neuron firing. It isn't true, because the civil war and its causes were far more complex but there is not enough time to discuss such a complicated subject here and now.

The civil war and reconstruction indelibly marked the South and set it apart in numerous significant ways. As a sub-culture of the United States, the region is home to a very large group of people -- once its major demographic -- descended from soldiers, sailors and civilians of the Confederate States of America.

For a century and a half, they have honored their ancestors with monuments, banners, place names, story and song.

Cultural genocide is the deliberate destruction of the cultural heritage of a people or nation for political, military, religious, ideological, ethnic or racial reasons.

In the wake of a horrific mass murder in Charleston, South Carolina almost three weeks ago, an orchestrated tsunami has swept across the South, targeting anything Confederate, although the shooter's motives had nothing to do with Confederate heritage.

Confederate items have been removed from shelves by retailers, flags lowered, and monuments vandalized. There have been calls to remove or destroy Confederate memorials. There is even a clamoring by the NAACP and others to prohibit Confederate flags and symbols on private property.

If you remove the flags and the Confederate monument in Pensacola, you will aid the cultural genocide of a large group of Southerners for fallacious and faithless reasons, set precedent for obliteration of other items of cultural heritage that might offend someone, from busts of Bernardo de Galvez and Andrew Jackson to the statue of Don Tristan de Luna to The Wall South and whether you intend it or not, you will be painting a multitude of good, decent constituents with a Dylann Roof-colored brush.