No, not again
To the editor:
Much like most of you, I am saddened by the fact that in South Carolina a young white man can walk into a church, spend one-hour worshiping with people and then take a gun out and kill nine of them.
Now basically this is what the whole story was about.
It just doesn’t seem to be enough to satisfy the media.
The first thing I heard them jump on after the murders was the Confederate battle flag. They began saying things like this flag causes people to want to murder or to hate others. I have been in the South all of my life and having seen this flag numerous times it has never caused me to feel this way. Number one, the flag that most are familiar with is purely a Confederate battle flag. The flag of the Confederate states of America is pure white with the stars and bars in the upper left corner. So the media doesn’t have that right yet.
Another thing is that President Obama gets on TV and says it happened because guns were just too accessible for the young man. Just reinforcement for his hoping for more gun control.
Now the Lee County branch of the NAACP swings into action. Once again they have begun complaining about the picture of Gen. Robert E Lee which is hanging in the Commission Chambers in Fort Myers. It has hung there for many years and presided over many, many public hearings.
It was Gen. Lee that this wonderful county in Florida was named after.
To my knowledge and from what I’ve seen, the people of color in the county have not been mistreated since the Civil War. The picture has always been displayed as a part of history and should be given the respect it so well deserves. The NAACP has even suggested that the picture be replaced with a picture of Gen. Lee in civilian clothes instead of the uniform he wore so proudly. They have even made the suggestion we stop referring to him as General, a position he so proudly earned.
Currently there is a big argument over the new history textbooks in this county. It seems the new books had omitted names such as Adolf Hitler and other tyrants of the past. All of us know of the Holocaust and the many horrible things that have happened. That doesn’t mean we want to turn our back and pretend that it didn’t happen at all.
I am concerned that if we continue to entertain the thoughts that the NAACP put before us, the next step that they take may take be to request that the textbooks remove all indications of slavery and then we can begin to pretend that that also never happened.
Mary West
Cape Coral