It's time to chime in on this confederate flag brouhaha of recent months. You know where we stand in regards to the gunning down of innocents on a South Carolina church and the continuation of any sorts of racism in our nation... including those who continue to say there is none.

I grew up down south. I was taught about the War of Northern Aggression, did school trips to Appomattox and Lexington, where Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are memorialized on or near the campus of the Virginia Military Institute. I remember segregation, open use of the word "coloreds," and the way many to this day lament the day they stopped having household help at no real cost.

The Civil War was brutal. It was unnecessary, too. State's rights to have slaves? What hogwash. The confederacy lost that war, and then a century later lost their attempts to retain Jim Crow laws via the Civil Rights and other acts.

Those days are gone, gone, gone. The deification of any of it as a "noble cause" is as silly as Germans still pushing for the nobility of Hitler's Nazism, royalists decrying the French Revolution, or countless other examples of defeated "causes" being forced from the mainstream of progressive and progressed civilizations.

Whenever I've gone home with my kid and people ask why he wears a blue cap, I simply say because he's on the winning side. End of story.

What about all this talk about that flag representing a brave heritage, or an ongoing sense of healthy rebellion? Hogwash, again. We don't fly swastikas. We don't celebrate mass killers (even if we did see someone sporting a Charles Manson t-shirt recently). We champion the winning and lasting values of our nation, and not the side of us all that wishes to take away others' rights.

On a whole other front, we feel a need to reply to those who have protested the creation of a new wall mural in Ellenville. Some have said that graffiti has no place here, that it's not art, that this is not Brooklyn, that non-locals have no say in what is beautiful here. What's that? Sorry to burst bubbles but hip hop culture has been a mainstay of our world for a generation now, and artists working with spray paint have risen to the top of the pile... where Picasso and Turner and Rembrandt once sat. Furthermore, the mixing of our area and Brooklyn is what contemporary economic development is all about now. Just as the fluidity of demographics is the real root of American democracy.

There are also those who have called what was painted a form of pornography. Huh? Because there's a beautiful woman painted in more purple than some might like? Because a small sliver of breast is visible, less than one catches on television any given night, or at a municipal swimming pool? Maybe the very idea of painted art is tantamount to effigies, to sacrilege?

If we're to grow as a community, and attract good business from elsewhere in our region, we have to embrace art and all it entails as one of the key elements in that elusive "quality of life" everyone is looking for.Even if it is not always what WE think is beautiful. Culture is a moveable thing... and good for that. End of story.

Finally, we need to again point out what happens when politics takes dogmatic action. Consider the proposed law discussed on our front page last issue, and how well intentioned it was — designed to quell a trend of copper pipe thefts and jewelry heists — but ended up overreaching and hitting the huge antiques and second-hand sale business in Ulster County instead. Just shows how important it is, as some have noted, to discuss legislation before writing it. And to listen to those being effected by a law before okaying it.

Sound familiar? Hey, I've been on the wrong side of legislation passed in this fashion. We all understand how it happens, so it's not really a matter of not trusting government or anyone with power.

In the end it all comes down to treating language with respect, and ensuring we do use the right words. Always.