Some Thoughts from July 4 Commentators | Eastern North Carolina Now

    This has been one of the most trying months in America leading up to July 4. We have the tragic shooting in SC with their Legislature now debating whether to remove the Confederate Battle Flag from their complex. It has even drawn comment from NASCAR which has decided to try and end the constant display of the flag. A fiery crash at the last race got more coverage than the flag issue.

    I see it as simply a part of American History as opposed to the use the KKK made of it to foment hate and cross burning to intimidate blacks. In a corner of NC at Bladenboro, there has been a suspicious death by strangulation. It has not been very well covered in the media, but a young black man was found hanged off a swing frame when his mother says she knew of no suicidal thoughts.

    The bigger story is his relationship to an older white lady who had befriended him. She has had to move away---and that tells me "the rest of the story." Bladenboro is a small NC town on the back road between Fayetteville and Chadbourn. We used to travel through on our trip from Rocky Mount back to Loris, SC. It is a typical small southern town. The hate is still real in our state and many events indicate it is far from over.

    Years ago, the big signs of prominent size welcoming I-95 travelers to "Klan Country" quietly disappeared. I was more than glad to see it gone. That was Johnston County. The Woolworth sit in in Greensboro became famous as one of the first acts of defiance by black college students. We had the renaming of Aycock dorm on the ECU campus as another recent controversy.

    Back home in Georgia, Lester Maddox became famous for refusing to seat blacks at his Pickwick Restaurant in downtown Atlanta. He even had a basket of hatchet handles he sold. I left for Wake Forest and Southeastern Seminary in 1967 as Lester became Governor of Georgia. I was glad to get away from such a subtle racial conservatism brought to the governor's chair---only to tune in Channel 5 (WRAL) my first afternoon. Jesse Helms came on with his ultra-conservative station manager's commentary. My reaction was: "Well, well---Lester has a first Cousin in NC presenting stuff steeped in hate speak!"

    Jesse Helms was, in many ways, a good Senator. His office even helped me cut through red tape over a trial medication to save the life of a Rocky Mount man dying from Hepatitis C. They got the meds shipped to Chapel Hill and it stopped the disease so he could get a liver transplant that let him live a few more years. The medical staff at UNC Hospital said they had never seen a worse case at the micro levels of a man's body!

    Strom Thurmond was another "Dixicrat" whose political career thrived on racial hate. I met him often in political events where I had the Invocation. He would always send a handwritten note of thanks as he went home. His surface racial hate got him votes / his inner caring for his constituents showed he cared and could help when federal red tape was involved. His office got me a passport in record time as I contacted them on a federal matter. They ALSO helped my black Custodian correct his birthdate for Social Security purposes in equally record time. . .

    Both Strom and Jesse get my praise even if our politics were far apart on race. In a way, the fact I still keep Senator Thurmond's notes in my file is like the Battle Flag thing --- it was just a part of southern heritage while I knew too many who used the "N" word with no real hate attached. We can put behind us the "foolishness of history" along with its inconsistency---IF WE LEARN THE LESSON THAT WE IN AMERICA CAN CHANGE FOR THE BETTER.

    The other big red flag issue today is Homosexual Hate. I don't personally like nor approve of it, but my grandchildren know all about gay stuff and we can't deny it is a topic of great wrath these days.

    I find this editorial most insightful and it is right on target with the continued Marriage Amendment issues in NC. The courts bounced the public approval of only man/woman marriage --- thus proving warnings that "it was likely unconstitutional" from our Attorney General, Roy Cooper. Roy is a former back door neighbor in Rocky Mount and I worked for his father on some trees.

    He is a most smart and honest AG who is now running in 2016 for Governor!

    "In the man, or in the jackass?..." Jay Bookman, AJC-Atlanta Journal Constitution, 7-5-15

    "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

    Those words, published for all the world to see some 239 years ago this weekend, have proved to be among the most powerful ever written. Their author, Thomas Jefferson, took a somewhat vague sentiment that had been bubbling up in the American colonies and crystallized it into a bold, earth-shaking assertion.

    And the rumbling hasn't stopped, as those words continue to challenge us today. They were, for example, the direct cause, inspiration and justification for the Supreme Court ruling last month that gay Americans have the same right as everybody else to marry whom they choose.

    Gay or straight, we are created equal. We have, all of us, certain unalienable rights. And among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Surely the right to pursue happiness includes the right to marry the person of your choice.

    Opponents of the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling are admittedly correct when they argue that Jefferson would probably be horrified and astonished to learn that his words were being applied to same-sex marriage. That wasn't what he had in mind. They are also correct that in the past two centuries, we have expanded the meaning of terms such as equality and liberty significantly beyond what Jefferson had imagined.

    But while some see that as a problem, I see it as validation. We are making his words our words. We are taking sentiments and thoughts expressed on a dusty piece of parchment in another era and we are keeping them alive, vibrant and relevant to our own time.

    If you believe that liberty and equality are static concepts, it's worth pointing out that when Jefferson expressed those words in ink, when Georgia's own Button Gwinnett became the first person to sign it, it was only men who were considered theoretically equal. Only white men. And in many colonies at the time, it was only white men who owned property.

    Jefferson supported a property requirement to vote, as did John Adams, his co-author of the Declaration. If you give the right to vote to those without property - the renter, the workman, the servant, the city dweller - "every man who has not a farthing will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state," Adams warned. "It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks to one common level."

    But Benjamin Franklin, who often had what we would consider a more modern sensibility, thought that property requirement ridiculous:

    "Today a man owns a jackass worth 50 dollars and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election the jackass dies. The man in the mean time has become more experienced, his knowledge of the principles of government, and his acquaintance with mankind, are more extensive, and he is therefore better qualified to make a proper selection of rulers - but the jackass is dead and the man cannot vote. Now gentlemen, pray inform me, in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass?"

    The answer, as we came to understand, was in the man, and not just in the man but in the person.

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