CONFEDERAPHOBIA: ERADICATION OF ALL THINGS SOUTHERN

A phobia is a type of anxiety disorder, usually defined as a persistent fear of an object or situation in which the sufferer commits to great lengths in avoiding, typically disproportional to the actual danger posed, often being recognized as irrational.

The phobia now sweeping the United States is Confederaphobia - the extreme and irrational fear of all things Confederate.  It may be argued that Confederaphobia has an ever wider root--the fear of all things Southern.

The Confederate States of America was born in February 1861 just before the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln and it vanished on April 9, 1865 when Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Norther Virginia.  For 154 years, the corpse of the Confederacy has existed only in museums, history books and a few old TV shows or motion pictures.

Then, in June of 2015, a crazed madman committed a tragic act of murder in Charleston, SC that rekindled a political reaction to remove the "Confederate flag" from the South Carolina capitol building. Race baiting activists and politicians raced to seize the moment to declare their solidarity with the victims of the tragedy, not bad or unusual, except that they didn't know where to stop. With 24 hours, a new Confederaphobia swept the nation--as political leaders of both parties sprang to be first to endorse the removal of all things Confederate, indeed all things Southern, from the American consciousness.  It was no longer just about a historic battle flag--it was about a culture--a way of life--a geographic region of the country.  The unwilling corpse of the old Confederacy was raised to life and the Civil War began to be fought all over again.  The bloody shirt was waved by Northerners and liberals and everything they hate came to be symbolized in the physical symbol of the "Confederate flag."  The North didn't show nearly this much resentment to the South in 1865, even during radical Reconstruction.

And it was no longer just about government.  Wal Mart, Ebay, Amazon and dozens of retailers pledged to remove any vestige of the cultural South from the culture.  This included video games, TV shows, movies and Southern recepies.  Immediately, Gone with the Wind, Southern Magnolias, the Dukes of Hazzard--anything with a Southern theme or reference had to disappear.

The Governor of Alabama ordered the removal of the Confederate flag, probably in keeping with the wishes of the national GOP which felt it an opportune time to get rid of what it perceived as an albatross around its neck.  The governor found no Confederate flag atop the Alabama capitol (it had been removed in 1992), so he hastily ordered the removal of Confederate flags from memorials and Civil War museums.

Not too surprisingly in today's ultra politically correct society, almost nobody has the balls to stand up to Confederaphobia and call it what it is--irrational, ridiculous, stupid and unnecessary.  

The thing that lasted only 4 brief years and vanished in 1865 has suddenly become the number one threat to America and the most feared entity in the national consciousness.  We seem to fear the old Confederacy (and all remotely related Southern culture) much more than we fear Isis, Al-Queda, global terrorism, the Iranian nuclear bomb, or any other clear and present danger.  There is presently no end in site.  Confederaphobia is rampant.  Like all phobias, it is driver by irrational fear and the need to condense intangible problems into an object that can be seen and destroyed.  It is much easier to destroy the Confederate flag, as stupid as that is, than to deal with the real cause of the tragedy in South Carolina, which the flag had nothing to do with.