Get thee to a shrink

This wasn't supposed to happen here

[Reprinted from Issues & Views July 30, 2001]

After years of being called irrelevant, out-of-touch, and even counter-productive, the stewards of the NAACP were forced to find some means to justify the need to keep the organization's doors open. How best to rejuvenate the fundraising machine than to reach backwards to the old standby grievances of slavery and Jim Crow? And, thus, since the early 1990s, blacks have been exhorted by these leaders to publicly decry all things Confederate. Monuments, songs, flags, books--all are to be shunned, banned and even outlawed, if possible.

Blacks who care nothing about this issue are goaded into caring. Blacks who are fond of the familiar traditional Confederate symbols and music, and in no way feel threatened by their public display, must be prepared to be vilified with the many variations on the theme of "Uncle Tom," and sometimes castigated as traitors. Some marginal types read the leadership's ongoing hyping of southern symbols as depictions of "hate" and "racism" as a signal to harm whites and destroy property.

NAACP fundraising drives actually highlight this contrived conflict in the South. Letters urge donors to be generous in giving, to assure success in the campaign to defeat flag-flying southern bigots. One wonders just who would send money to support such a spurious cause. Since we know that all the major dollars come from whites, it's hard to imagine the type of person who could be roused to write a check to further such obviously bogus goals. Can it be assumed that all these check writers share the motives of the NAACP and its cohorts to cause unnecessary social division and to deny a population of Americans the right to celebrate their heritage as they see fit?

It seems clear that anyone who claims to feel "hurt" or "uncomfortable" or "intimidated" by the sight of a symbol, or the sound of a cherished song being sung, is in dire need of adequate counseling--perhaps the kind of "anger management" counseling that liberals so eagerly prescribe for critics of their politically correct precepts. Columnist Charley Reese puts it aptly: "You would think sensible folks would realize that someone who says he is offended by an inanimate object is simply revealing his own neuroses." Government-funded "sensitivity" programs, to cure those who suffer bouts of Symbol Hatred, might give liberals a taste of their own medicine.

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