Reconstruction ended in 1877. There are unreconstructed Americans still. Hail to them.
At Butler High School, display of the Confederate flag is banned: The symbol of rebellion is sewn into the fabric of slavery; it is a filthy rag dyed in the blood of the bondsman; it is ethnic intimidation.
The words are as rigid and as deadly as a bayonet.
Shed tears for a nation at war with its own flesh. Cheer a black mother who said let them wear the Stars and Bars, let them wear Malcolm X.
The Stars and Stripes flew, proudly, over the South where one man held another in thrall. It flew again after a wild interregnum, declaring victory and defeat to the same American eyes.
Many decades before, the first plan of government for the United States of America — the Articles of Confederation, which created a “confederacy” – proclaimed a “perpetual union” that lasted fewer than 10 years.
The Constitution, deliberately, contains no language of the sort.
Abraham Lincoln, however, was not blinded to his mission by the text. Secession, he thought, was illegal. The unreconstructed of the 21st century do not acquiesce to Lincoln's private and non-ratified amendment to the Constitution, which is accepted now in law and practice.
The current federal incarnation, emboldened by its victory of 1865, rains offal on states' rights with impunity. (We have a Department of Education; that is sufficient proof.)
How is that possible⢠Why, the second confederacy lost the war, a war that wasn't just about slavery and race, not by a Butler County mile.
