Agreed, there's no doubt the winners make the rules and pick a flag. We can all find a photo or historical record of one piece of cloth going up and another coming down. Sometimes more peacefully than others.
I don't know who started the Spanish/Portugese/French/Dutch/English vs. Native Americans...could be argued ad infinitum, I would believe. I could dedicate the rest of my life to trying to figure it out and would probably always have reasonable doubt due to the scope and number of "violations" to be studied and reflected upon. I wasn't there and can't say for sure.
The point I hope to make, and attempted to make albeit rather abruptly and with insufficient sincerity, was that one guy with a flag can't speak for or represent everyone with the same flag or the flag itself. To me, and maybe I'm narrow minded or ignorant, it is a similar argument to one made by anti-gunners...one person did something horrible, terrible and violent with a gun, so get rid of the guns. After all, a gun is a weapon, a tool that was invented to, at least initially, kill or incapacitate someone. I can't imagine the first guy with a gun thought, "Damn, gonna run this in production class next week..." he wanted to gain an advantage.
Just like every person who listens to hip hop isn't a drug dealer or every person who wants immigrants to file paperwork isn't a xenophobe. If someone shoots up a mall later this year and has a Gadsden flag in his apartment, do we ban those? If someone gets busted for domestic abuse and has a Mexican flag sticker on his car, do we blame it on the flag?
"This is all very different from the Confederate flag and you know it!" some will say. Maybe it is. I'm just tired of the hierarchy of the offended where Group A's suffering is counted as more offensive than Group B's suffering. It is Earth and people -- individuals and/or groups -- are being fist-****ed by other individuals and/or groups constantly.
Personally, I think the **** responsible for the shooting in SC should be put on trial and if/when found guilty, should be publicly hung, with it broadcast on TV. No "he's insane" defense, "he'll reform / it's worse for him in jail than being dead" bull ****. Hang the ****er dead. I blame him, not his flag.
