SEEING RED
by Randy Reynolds
You think the red field in the Confederate battle flag
represents the Blood of Christ
(like He shed His blood in the Civil War or something)??
You think the white border represents the Protection of God?
That must be why the South won. (No, wait!)
And the blue X represents the Christian Cross
as if killing to defend the right to own slaves
was the
Christian thing to do?
I can’t even deal with the white and the blue
because when I look at that flag all I see is red,
and the red isn’t Jesus’ blood.
622,000 dead on the battlefield (and untold numbers since)—
622,000 remarkable or unremarkable human beings,
loved or unloved, voluntary or conscripted,
northern or
southern human beings
(plus those who’ve joined them since).
622,000 is an almost
unimaginable number of bodies,
headstones or names
but maybe I can show
622,000 cyphers.
I reduce each of the Civil War dead to a dot on a page,
each dot representing someone who died fighting his
countrymen—
even brothers, cousins, in-laws, friends—
fighting them in a war insisted upon by Southern masters
who,
because they were backed by 134 verses in the King James
Bible,
thought God was on the side of slavery and would surely help
them win.
If each of the war dead gets a dot
and I put 622 dots on the page…never mind.
I have no place to post 1,000 pages.
You look at the
red field in the Confederate battle flag
and see the Blood of Christ?
Really?
I look at it and see the blood that was shed
when the Southern Aristocracy took up arms to defend
their "heritage" of owning other human beings.
