There are many things in this world that irk me, but one of my biggest pet peeves to date is the ubiq­ui­tous use of the Confederate flag by peo­ple who have no idea where it comes from or what it means. It’s a part of our country’s his­tory, but today it has been reduced to a syn­onym for “red­neck rebel.”

In the past weeks some vagabond chalk­ers hit sev­eral places on cam­pus writ­ing obscen­i­ties and in one place draw­ing a Confederate flag. I’m not mad about that. I’m all for harm­less chalk­ing. It makes me laugh.

What vexed me was the story my boss told me. She was walk­ing by the chalked flag and noticed a stu­dent tak­ing a pic­ture of the flag. A short con­ver­sa­tion ensued, which entailed my boss not­ing that she didn’t mind or find the flag offen­sive since it was part of our nation’s his­tory, but said it was odd to see it so far north of the Mason Dixon Line. What my boss told me next floored me. The student’s response was “What’s the Mason Dixon Line?”

The her­itage ver­sus hate argu­ment I see no quar­rel with, con­sid­er­ing the ver­sion of the stars and bars pop­u­lar today wasn’t the only flag used in the civil war. The Confederacy was so dis­or­ga­nized flag-wise that there were at one point 10 offi­cial flags used. To me, the Confederate flag we see now is a bas­tardiza­tion of a mem­ory that is slowly being for­got­ten by the many igno­rant fools wish­ing to seem like a rebel. The Confederates weren’t rebels. They were sol­diers fight­ing for their coun­try. The descen­dants of Confederate sol­diers have every right to cel­e­brate their history.

However, the mem­ory of these sol­diers is for­got­ten and lost when we take a sym­bol of suf­fer­ing and war and turn it into a pop-culture icon used by peo­ple who drive enor­mous trucks and lis­ten to coun­try music. I’ve found in my trav­els and rela­tions that more peo­ple north of the Mason Dixon Line use and dis­play the Confederate flag than those of true south­ern her­itage and habi­tude. Most of my south­ern rel­a­tives fly an American flag. Why? Because we are one coun­try united. The con­flict of the North and South has been put to rest for well over a cen­tury. The South will not rise again.

Persons who choose to dis­play the Confederate flag with lit­tle to no regard of its sig­nif­i­cance only tar­nish our country’s his­tory and the mem­ory of the hun­dreds of thou­sands of indi­vid­u­als who died dur­ing the war. The Civil War alone caused more deaths than all other wars America has entered com­bined. It turned fam­i­lies against one another. It freed slaves in the South, but killed thou­sands of Irish immi­grants from the North in the process. In the long run, it left both the North, the South and the sub­se­quent reuni­fied nation in dire straits.

The sheer obtuse­ness of not know­ing where the Mason Dixon Line is located only under­lines the stereo­type of those who fly the stars and bars. Not all peo­ple who fly the Confederate flag are igno­rant, but I’ve found it very hard to find some­one North of the Mason Dixon Line who actu­ally has a claim to fly­ing this flag or respects what it stands for, both the good and the bad.

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