Good to see it…to ME seeing the stars and bars brings up images of country music, pickups and bbq, NASCAR and duck-hunting; in short, the good things about my youth in the South. I know intellectually the bad stuff it stood for, but my visceral reaction is the same, it’s just too ingrained to change. When it came up in a college class, a black classmate pointed out that that’s exactly how black people feel, but the connection is negative. They can’t somehow turn it off, or see it my way. They can understand it maybe, but it will always be hurtful.
It clicked. I replaced the only S&B flag I had (a patch on my hunting jacket) with a Remington patch. Only slightly less offensive to some here, I’m sure, but one of my black hunting partners commented on it. “Remington makes a fine gun, don’t they?”…Never was I more sure I’d made the right call.
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