To the editor:
Re: Linda Dunn’s column condemning Confederate Flag supporters on Aug.6:
Apparently, we are in the presence those with mind-reading abilities. Again today, I was compared to Hitler and the Nazis along with being anti-Semitic. It would probably shock her to know that I have several Jewish friends that I met in college and admired them for their deep devotion to their religion compared to the Protestants I knew.
Maybe we are more alike than you know: My family emigrated from Ireland in the early 1800s and also landed in North Carolina then eventually moved to Tennessee after the government took the land from Native Americans to make room for white westward expansion. It seems that anyone who had family who fought in the Indian Wars was racist — by your standards — or was that OK since our central government ordered it up? You can pick and choose your stories and make alternative endings to support your point of view and to beat down someone else’s thoughts.
Do you really think you know what is in the mind of someone else? Maybe they haven’t been brainwashed with political correctness and still have the ability to be a free thinker.
Just for an example: In school, I was only taught that President Lincoln was a great person who saved the U.S. from the scourge of evil slavery. But if you research and read Abraham Lincoln’s debates against Stephen Douglas, he expresses white superiority/racism, because at that time he knew he had to straddle the fence and say what was necessary to get elected. Odd comments for someone who was the "Great Emancipator"! He was perhaps the greatest politician ever with his rhetoric and manner — knowing exactly when to change sides. I, too, spent a lot of time in my youth visiting my Southern relatives. Agriculture was the main way to make a living; my ancestors had large families, probably so they had enough farmhands. No, they didn’t have any slaves, but they weren’t part of the elite 10% that were big plantation owners. My childhood impression was that Blacks were looked on as friends in rural Tennessee and often sharecropped together, but back up in Indianapolis, they were despised and not wanted around your neighborhood.
Nice of you to agree that it is a person’s constitutional right to fly the Confederate flag, just as it is to fly flags celeberting Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, Defund The Police, Back The Blue, LGBTQ, NASCAR, Harley-Davidson, Purdue, IU, NFL, NBA, NRA, etc. When it comes to the day that people can decide that Greenfield is "their city" or Hancock County is their "county" and they can tell individual residents what is proper, acceptable, or allowed outside of our law and constitution, then we might as well bring some neo-Nazis over to help us transition properly.
Maybe James Whitcomb Riley was anti-Semitic and the statue in front of the courthouse should be removed? When you start being judgmental of someone else because they don’t agree with your point of view on an issue, then where does it stop? We are a deeply divided nation today mainly because of "special people" that have the ability through the national media clear down to the local newspaper. Like Charles Barkley says, you can’t solve racism when you have racist hatred in your heart against others. Is the Confederate flag heritage or hate? To me, it’s my heritage, but apparently to you and columnist Michael Adkins it can only be hate.
D.V. Dunn
Greenfield
