Letters

OK, final word on The Flag

To the editor:

I hope I’m not too late to the party on the I-10 Confederate Battle Flag controversy, but I just found out about it while reading your March 12 issue. Although I respect the First Amendment rights of the Sons of Confederate Veterans to display the flag as private citizens – and I do feel that Mr. Holbert’s original column unfairly maligned the flag’s supporters as banjo-picking rednecks – I must agree that the flag has no rightful place in official or public display, and that neo-Confederate arguments in its defense are historically inaccurate.

People who call the Confederate Battle Flag a symbol of “heritage, not hate” are forgetting, perhaps conveniently, that this flag began as the emblem of an army dedicated to the dissolution of the United States as a political union. After that war ended, its popularity correspondingly declined. It wasn’t until the Civil Rights era – more than a hundred years after we once more became one nation under God – that segregationist state legislatures started flying it as a form of protest against equal voting rights for blacks. To claim that the Confederate battle flag has no link to institutionalized racism – or to terrorist organizations such as the KKK – is a little like saying that hammers and sickles have nothing to do with Communism. Even if the flag didn’t begin as a racist symbol – and I would argue that it did, to the extent that the Confederacy defended the “peculiar institution” of slavery – it has certainly acquired that stain over the decades.

Lest anyone think me one of those “yankee mongrels” (as one letter-writer calls them), I note that I am an Alabama native, descended from at least four Confederate veterans of the Civil War. Like most of the frontline soldiers of that tragic conflict, my ancestors had no stake in the plantation economy and did not own slaves. Furthermore, I do not doubt that they fought honorably and did what they considered to be their duty. Even so, I must reluctantly deem the cause for which they fought to be a bad one.

Arguments that the Civil War was “not about slavery” are undermined by the public statements of Confederate political and military leaders, who certainly believed that secession and slavery went hand in glove. Take, for example, the famous “Cornerstone Speech” of CSA Vice President Alexander Stephens, in which he announced that the foundation of the Confederacy “rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery – subordination to the superior race – is his natural and normal condition.” Take also the words of one of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. In the aftermath of the Ft. Pillow massacre – during which his men murdered unarmed black Union soldiers after they’d surrendered – Forrest reported that “it is hoped that these facts will demonstrated to the northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.” And the flag his soldiers carried while conducting this act of outright barbarism? That would be the very same one now flying proudly over Interstate 10.

Thomas Lakeman

Fairhope, Alabama

Florida Street debacle

To the editor:

Read with great interest your article on the Florida St. sewer project and wanted to give you even more about it, as I live in the very extreme heart of the project. In front of my house was a very major part of the installed system; I have lived with this thing for months on end and it’s been a real nightmare at times. I have had the cable cut; the phone lines in the street have been cut four times; they have broken the water line that serves the house, and left it running into the dirt road.

So it turned into a mud river as it got progressively worse hour by hour (it took MAWSS 4 1/2 hours to repair the damage and a crew of six people, late at night); when I confronted them about the damage, they were aware of it, and left it, as it ‘wasn’t that bad when we left and yes the water was running’. I have endured months on end the shaking of the house like an earthquake as they rammed the frame structure into the ground piece by piece… and I mean pounded massive girders hour upon hour upon hour, section after section after section, day after day after day.

At the end of my driveway is the biggest portion of the entire project; most concentrated/took the longest to install; the massive ditch 25’ wide/30’ deep all had to be dug first before girders/frame installed. Let me tell you about Walton Construction, since this is their first time as a city contract winner; they are not used to dealing with or having to work in a residential area and don’t like having to put up with people and their houses. When they were digging the massive ditch, they were hitting my 130-year-old oak at the end of my driveway, as they swung around the loads of dirt in the huge backhoe.

When I went out to talk to the machine operator one morning in disgust at what they were doing, and asked him to quit hitting my tree/branches as I felt he was going to throw it into shock with all the slamming, he in no uncertain terms told me it was not my tree, it was on city property/right of way (the canopy of the tree did extend over the easement line, but the tree base was mine) and he also told me the tree was in his way… I told him to move the dump truck over 10 feet when loading it and there wouldn’t be a problem and he told me he didn’t have to.

When I came home the next day, Friday, Walton had had the city come out and trim the tree, but!... the tree commission workers had cut the tree above the city line 30/35’ straight up; cut anything and everything in its way, massive branches and all. By law, the city workers know that they can legally cut 13’6” above the city line and that’s all. Walton’s men told them to clear cut everything straight up 30/35’ and they did it.

These men work for the city tree commission, the very agency that is there to protect the trees and me from people like Walton; they decimated the tree, knowingly and willingly.

When I confronted the director of the department, he came by a week later and was shocked at what he saw that had been done, and yes, there was a mistake made, and it was Ron Jackson that issued the crew to the property. Then to add insult to injury, when he was here and we were having our ‘spirited’ conversation he said it was unfortunate, and they really didn’t need to have cut my tree at all. I now stand a good chance of losing the tree in time due to the cutting and then the cutting of the root structure in the street area that was dug up for the sewer system; a double whammy against the stately old tree. I could have shot the entire lot of them in real short order.

This is only a smattering of what has gone on around here and for the longest time as well. Walton Construction hopefully will never have a city contract again, but it is too late at this point to do any thing about it. They are not people-oriented by any stretch of the imagination.

Kerry Muzzey

Mobile

Thanks for Trolley’s review

To the editor:

What an awesome review of Trolley’s. Tammy has worked so hard and so long to make what she has incredible. She is a great friend and will do a great job making the loop area a fun place to hang out with good food for all those that live nearby. Again thanks for writing a great review!

Andrea Armenakis Stallworth

Mobile

Baldwin nixed boat launch

To the editor:

I may be wrong, but (in reference to George Crozier’s 3/12/08-3/25/08 column)I believe the OB (Orange Beach) council approved the project. It was the Baldwin County Commission that gave a negative endorsement of the project to the State after Barnette Lawley insisted that the County air their opinion.

I don’t know why since the project is in OB and the land belongs to the State. The only logical conclusion is that the County was invoked since the multi-millionaires who own property on Ono Island (and are against the project) have long refused to annex into Orange Beach while continuing to enjoy City services and use the library etc. are still technically in the County.

In addition, the County has a vendetta with OB and GS since the school board issue and their refusal to endorse a new lodging tax. Money talks even in the face of common sense. Thank you and keep up the good work!!!

Doug Bailey

Yes Virginia, there is Global Warming

To the editor:

Fed up with earthquakes? Why not request the UN to eliminate them? Want to take up residence on the moon? Why not ask the UN to move the earth closer to the moon (or vice versa if it’s simpler) so you can commute more easily? Want more people to appreciate eclipses and the cosmos? Why not ask the UN to arrange it? After all, it’s the world’s money that the UN uses, and the world’s media will support things without any basis.

Ridiculous questions? No more than the concepts that global warming is caused by mankind, and that mankind can stop global warming.

Although natural global warming cause(s) can not yet be explained scientifically, root cause certainly cannot be man induced, for signs of global warmings predate man’s existence and man’s releases of CO2 by many thousands of years. Markedly, mankind has benefited from previous natural global warmings-the last two are prime examples. These effects should be hailed, even if aspects of the whys and wherefores cannot yet be explained. But the UN and its followers do not acknowledge natural global warmings -they can not afford to, figuratively and literally. Rather, they deny that these periods of climatic history even happened!

Natural global warmings are mutually confirmed by ice cores, tree rings, pollen counts, coral, glaciers, and sea bed sediments – just some of the signal-givers. Presently, the earth is more than one hundred years into the latest natural global warming cycle – which might last several hundred years more according to historic indicators.

Recent natural global warmings include the comfortable Roman period, during which the Roman empire flourished, as did agriculture and good health, besides population expansions. The Medieval period was another, with Vikings farming successfully in Greenland and growing grapes in Newfoundland, Canada, plus the booming of Chinese agriculture with accompanying variation in traditional habitat style, as well as tropical/subtropical vegetation thriving in far north Europe, Asia, and North America. Similar treasures of evidence have been found in southern hemisphere studies in Africa, South America, Australia, besides other locations.

The root of today’s preposterous theory of manmade global warming is that the raised CO2 content in the earth’s atmosphere is due to man’s pollution. Yet it is known that high CO2 in the atmosphere follows global warming! This reality, confirmed by a wealth of historical markers (ice cores, tree rings, and sea bed sediments, for example), is shrugged off by global warming sensationalists.

It may be some time before the fantasy of manmade global warming – the myth plus the industry – is finally laid to rest, but truth is stubborn and can be counted on to persist.

Desmond Harvey

Mobile

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