The Confederate flag thing is a passionately divisive subject, and I don’t think most people on each side fully get where the other people are coming from.

I grew up in a culture suffused with a narrative of oppression. I don’t think most of my immediate relatives related this narrative to me – a few, but not most – but would they need to, when it permeates a culture? The culture I grew up in was, still is, saturated with a narrative of Northern oppression against the South. Intellectual oppression against the economically disadvantaged. Liberal oppression against simple, traditional folk. Urban oppression against rural people. Federal oppression against states. Yankee oppression.

“It’s not about race. It’s about Yankees keeping us all down, black AND white.”

It does not matter that the Confederate flag was created for the Army of Northern Virginia by someone who wanted it to be a banner of white supremacy. It doesn’t matter than haters and killers and fiends of the vilest evil have embraced it and claimed it and infused it with the worst meaning a symbol can carry.

For people who buy into that pervasive narrative, the Confederate flag is a symbol of defiance. For them it means, “I rise up. I do not accept defeat.” This is where the passion and the pride comes from.

I’ve been too many places and seen too much to buy into that narrative anymore. I find Washington corrupt, and I find that the uber rich control far more than they have any right to, and I find that the “them” and “us” equation is not about Yankees and Southerners. The narrative comes from generations of bitter resentment and an incomplete picture of whence our discontent really comes.

Confederates believe themselves to be Browncoats, bravely struggling against those who would step on their necks. They are who the Browncoats are based upon, I do believe.

Debate the symbolism of the Confederate flag all you like. Debate the swastika. Cases can be made.

What troubles me is that the narrative survives, despite facts and figures, logic and reason. You can’t brain a heart thing, and this is one of those things. I feel conflicted and despairing because I see people suffering when there is no need. But you can’t convince people by telling them that some of their most tightly held beliefs aren’t true, no matter what data you bring. Even if you can demonstrate that those beliefs are hurting them, are the very cause of their pain.

“They’re taking our flag. They’re taking our guns. They’re taking our religious liberty. They’re taking our self-determination.”

And in the meantime, others really are burning down houses of worship and doing racial violence. And it’s their flag too.