Editor’s note: This letter is directed at Sam Smith, a staff writer for the East Tennessean.

Dear Mr. Smith,

I’m not writing you to be published, I could care less about that.

If you print this, fine, whatever, but I just wanted to bring up some points in your piece about the Confederate war flag.

I’ll start with the first point when you brought up how tacky it was to fly a losing flag. How many people kept Al Gore and John Kerry stickers on their cars in the eight previous years?

Are they as equally tacky or obnoxious as those who still have McCain/Palin stickers on their cars?

Also, being a Civil War buff, you realize that President Lincoln was anti-slavery but he had no interest in equal rights, he just didn’t think that the African people our ancestors essentially kidnapped should be slaves.

Also, and it’s typical of a college student who obviously isn’t into the Civil War to misinterpret this.

Are there racist people in the south that fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War? Yes.

There were also racists in the Union Army. Go watch the movie “Glory,” based on factual events. Read up on it. While the history books will always say that slavery was the primary cause of the war between the states, that was just an excuse.

That war is the same battles we’re fighting today, and fought during the Revolutionary War. A big, powerful, centralized government.

The plantation owners owned slaves, which was about one percent of the South at that time.

Think of it as the generalization that “everybody” at ETSU is in a Greek organization. You and I both as reasonable people know for a fact that isn’t true.

The Confederate flag has been bastardized as a symbol of hate, I wholeheartedly agree with you there, just as those disgusting, mouth-breathing, meth-cooking, dirt bags also use the cross as a symbol of hate. To me these people are terrorists.

What I would like to see out of aspiring and current journalists is a full steam attack on hate groups in this country, whether it be Neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panthers or anti-gay groups who physically commit crimes. I think this country has made the mistake time and time again that hate is only associated with white people hating minorities. Hate doesn’t discriminate.

Hate is something that every human being is capable of feeling.

Blacks, whites, Hispanics, gay, straight, whatever.

Now, let me ask you this.

The homosexual community has taken the word “gay” and the rainbow symbol and turned into something of their own, when in reality the rainbow was a Christian-based symbol. Is it fair to the Christians that they now can’t associate with rainbows because of a group who has an alternative way of thinking has taken it as their own?

Lastly, I don’t fly the Confederate war flag, I don’t think the South will rise again and all that crap.

What I do believe in earnest is that as society we are still separating ourselves by color. Affirmative Action, minority scholarships, the NAACP, all of these things that at one time were probably needed, now, I don’t think as much.

To me they are nothing more than Jim Crow laws. I also believe that the compromise for true Civil War buffs like myself is to proudly display the peace time flag of the Confederacy, not the war flag. Most Americans wouldn’t even know what that flag is. Would you know it if you saw it?

– Scott Lawson, Class of 2006

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