October 3rd, 2015: A Day Which Will Live In Infamy

Happy Halloween again! As you might have guessed, any plans I had for this momentous day fell through, but that's okay, because now I can share my latest HonorSociety.org piece with you! This one is a bit polemical even by my standards, but considering how the overall product turned out, I'm very happy with it. You can access the original article here or read it below:

                                     October 3rd, 2015: A Day Which Will Live In Infamy

As Halloween approaches, it seems like only yesterday that October reared it's head around the corner and was upon us. Indeed, few can forget the horrific event that rang in the new month: the mass murder of 9 innocent people at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. This senseless act sent shock waves across the nation, with thousands mourning and President Barack Obama himself addressing the country shortly afterwards. In his speech, he offered condolences to the families affected, praise for the emergency service personnel acting on the scene, and most notably vitriol for what he termed our "inaction" in the face of gun violence (as opposed to violence in general). "Somehow, this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it. We've become numb to this," he lamented, before pronouncing judgment on the American people, like an indignant Old Testament prophet: "This is a political choice that we make to allow this to happen every few months in America. We collectively are answerable to those who lose their loved ones because of our inaction." Unsurprisingly, the president's display of opprobrium proved to be very controversial, with some arguing that he was exploiting the Oregon shooting to push an anti-gun agenda, while others commended him for taking a stand against the gun lobby and pushing for "common sense" gun legislation. The reaction of all parties involved would be very different, however, when another massacre occurred just two days later, albeit under very different circumstances.

On October 3rd, under cover of darkness, a low-flying, heavily-armed AC-130 gunship made it's way towards Kunduz, the capital of Kunduz Province and the fifth largest city in Afghanistan. The previous month, the city had fallen to the Taliban, marking the group's first successful seizure of a major population center since a U.S.-led coalition invaded the country in 2001 and turning the area into a heated battleground between Taliban fighters and American and Afghan government forces. It was against this bloody backdrop that the gunship was deployed, and before the night was over, it would contribute most indelibly to the ongoing carnage. As the plane lumbered across the Afghan sky, the crew, taking a closer look at their orders, phoned their superiors. Something didn't seem right: their target, if they understood their orders correctly, was a hospital, specifically the Medecins Sans Frontieres (known in the English-speaking world as the Nobel Peace Prize-winning charity Doctors Without Borders) hospital that was renowned in the area for treating wounded soldiers and civilians alike. The crew questioned the legality of their mission, but judging by what followed, the brass assuaged their doubts and gave them the go.

One can only assume the majority of the hospital's patients, variously afflicted by bullets, ordinance and disease, had been asleep for some time when the first bombs were dropped in the wee hours of the morning. And 15 minutes later, another round of bombs was dropped. And another 15 minutes later, another. Several patients burned to death as they lay in their beds, incinerated by their purported liberators. Another was lying on an operating table ready to undergo examination by hospital staff when the bombing started. Fearing for their lives, the doctors fled, leaving the patient to die as he waited to be operated on. Half an hour into this airborne onslaught, the staff finally figured out what was happening and immediately phoned American and Afghan authorities, urging them to tell the plane to stand down. The end result of the phone exchange can be seen in a shocking statement provided by MSF spokeswoman Dalila Mahdawi: "The bombing continued for more than 30 minutes after American and Afghan military officials in Kabul and Washington were first informed."  When the bombs finally stopped falling after an hour, 30 people, including 10 patients, 13 MSF staff, and 7 unidentified individuals, were dead, dozens more wounded, and the only health facility of it's caliber in the region was destroyed, denying such life-saving services as high-quality surgeries, post-operative and rehabilitation care to countless Afghans for the foreseeable future.

Understandably, the hospital's parent organization (as well as a great many others) was outraged. MSF General Director Christopher Stokes referred to the air strike as a "war crime" and demanded that an independent, third-party investigation look into the incident and hold the perpetrators responsible. Others chimed in to condemn the bombing, with anti-war group Voices For Creative Nonviolence calling upon activists in the U.S. and around the world to congregate in front of hospitals with signs and banners that read "Dropping bombs here would be a war crime!" and "The same is true in Afghanistan," and oddball Republican-turned-Democratic candidate Lincoln Chafee obliquely referencing it at the Democratic debate on CNN, in an attempt to appeal to liberals' traditional noninterventionist leanings (going by his recent exit from the race, it didn't do him much good). Indeed, the act was so blatantly egregious that even President Obama issued what The New York Times dubbed a "rare" apology to MSF (how merciful of him!) It wasn't, however, a televised statement like the self-righteous one in which he once again wagged that finger of his at Americans for being too stupid to agree with him that he gave on national television a couple days before, but, tellingly, a short, meek statement issued by his Press Secretary and published on the White House website, where only people who were informed and interested in the subject matter would go out of their way to find it. Prefacing his apology with a disclaimer that he spoke "On behalf of the American people," (were these the same American people he chided for among their many sins, "inaction" just two days before?), he extended his "deepest condolences" to everyone killed and injured in the air strike. He (and he added, his wife Michelle too, for good measure) offered their "thoughts and prayers" to all civilians involved, as well as to their family members. He even promised to "work closely with President Ghani, the Afghan government, and our international partners" to continue their war against the remnants of the Taliban. But he flatly refused to consent to an independent investigation of the Kunduz air strike, insisting that a joint military, NATO and Afghan team remain at the lead of any inquiries into the bombing. If the arrival of the team at the compound where the hospital was located, in which the team arrived on the grounds in a tank and almost surely destroyed potential evidence in the case, is any indication, it will be a whitewash.

There will be no accountability. On the off-chance that there is, the crew of the gunship will be held entirely responsible, court martialed, and maybe even executed, while the higher-ups, however high it goes up, will get off-scotch free. It won't matter that they were just following orders, that they had doubts but their superiors insisted that they bomb the hospital anymore than it mattered that Second Lieutenant and convicted war criminal William Calley was, as he maintains to this day, ordered by his commander to slaughter 347 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. They will be scapegoats, as instrumental in carrying out this atrocity as they were; a tainted offering to absolve their co-conspirators of their sins. But it will be a long time before it is undeniably established that a sin has indeed been committed. Not by some shadowy, cigar-smoking men huddled around a table in a darkly-lit room, but by the people we have elected to represent us and the people we pay to fight overseas for us. By the people who elected and paid these people. By us.

At this point, I wouldn't blame you for thinking I had descended into a most morbid form of hysteria. Who knows, maybe I have. But say what you will, considering everything you have learned all your life about living in a democratic society where the government represents you, where it cannot take action without the demonstrated support of the people, and where it's armed officers, agents, and enforcers are paid for by your taxes, whose actions do you really feel responsible for: Christopher Harper-Mercer's or the crew on that gunship's? Whose salary did you pay? And who did you vote to send to the site of their respective massacres? If you answered with the former, please forward me your address so I can direct a SWAT team to it. 

It is for precisely this reason that October 3rd, 2015 will forever more live in infamy. It is not only a day in which the premeditated destruction of a facility that aimed to heal the sick and aid the weak and the gruesome, state-sanctioned murder of innocent lives occurred, but it is also a day in which the perpetrator, after vowing to crusade against violence days before, shrugged their shoulders, essentially said "sorry, sh-t happens", and moved on. A day in which America announced that it felt more responsible for the acts of a lone wolf gunman than for the acts of it's legally constituted armed forces. A day in which "inaction" was held to be worse than immoral actions. A day in which we abdicated our responsibility. A day in which we abdicated our humanity.

Zero Sense: How Ahmed Mohamed and His Clock Shined A Light On Educational Authoritarianism

And here's another article I wrote for September, about the Ahmed Mohamed incident and the larger zero tolerance trend it is a part of. I wrote one last article, but for whatever reason, it has yet to be published. Until then, check this one out and let me know what you think! The original article can be accessed here or read in it's entirety below.

Zero Sense: How Ahmed Mohamed and His Clock Shined A Light On Educational Authoritarianism

Things are looking up for Irving, Texas resident Ahmed Mohamed. A little over a month ago, he was yet another precocious adolescent who alternatively charmed and annoyed his instructors, occasionally accomplishing the latter through the use of ingenious contraptions he cooked up on his own. Fast forward to today, and he has received invitations to Facebook headquarters, Google Science Fair, and the White House, in addition to earning praise from the venerable George Takei, Star Trek's very own Mr. Sulu, and the slightly-less venerable Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama's very own Dick Cheney. What catapulted this young inventor to fame? Just a small incident in which school administrators thought a digital clock he assembled on his own was a bomb and had him dragged out in handcuffs by police before suspending him for three days, even after an hour and a half of questioning (or for that matter, an hour and a half of the suspected "bomb" notgoing off) proved beyond a doubt that it really was a clock they were dealing with. 

To account for the apparent discrepancy between the limited severity of the situation at hand and the overblown response to it, the Irving Police Department asserted that it never actually believed that he had a bomb: rather, Ahmed was apprehended for being in possession of what they believed was a "hoax bomb", the alleged purpose of which was to inspire as much panic and mayhem as possible. Having established that there never really was any danger, inquiring minds began to wonder if maybe a thinly-veiled Islamophobia was at work here. When confronted about this possibility, Irving Police Chief Larry Boyd flatly denied it, insisting that the department's reaction "would have been the same" regardless of the student's race or religious background, adding that, "We live in an age where you can't take things like that to school. Of course, we've seen across our country horrific things happen, so we have to err on the side of caution." While it might come as a surprise to many, the chief is right. Or rather, he's right about the first part of his statement. 

In December, 2013, a 6-year-old boy was suspended from a Maryland school for what administrators described as threatening "to shoot a student". How did the child make this threat? By playfully pointing his finger like a gun and saying "pow". When asked by the boy's mother why he was being disciplined so harshly for such a trivial offense, the school staff mentioned the then-recent Sandy Hook shooting, prompting her baffled reaction of "What does Connecticut have to do with my child in Maryland?" An even more pertinent question might have been "What does a crazed gunman massacring innocent people have to do with a 6-year-old playing with classmates?" A month after this little travesty of justice, a Pennsylvania girl was interrogated by school administrators and subsequently suspended for 10 days after making a "terroristic threat" to shoot herself and a fellow student. The fearsome weapon she planned to accomplish this with, as it turned out, was an bright pink, bubble-shooting "Hello Kitty" gun. Luckily, nobody was hurt - aside from the girl, that is, who suffered from stomach aches and night terrors for weeks after the whole ordeal. 

You don't even have to bring an object that peripherally resembles a weapon to school to incur the wrath of overzealous administrators: you can do as little as wear a shirt displaying guns on it and be disciplined for it, as Jared Marcum. An eighth-grader at Logan Middle School in West Virginia, Marcum made the mistake of thinking the First Amendment carried weight within the walls of school and wore an NRA t-shirt bearing a rifle and urging viewers to "Protect Your Right". Ironically, Marcum's rights would come under siege when one of his teachers ordered that he remove the shirt, a demand he refused to comply with on the grounds that he, like all Americans, was entitled to freedom of speech and expression. The ensuing events proved very telling about the current state of affairs in present-day America: for exercising his constitutionally-guaranteed rights, Marcum was hauled out of school by law enforcement agents and faced criminal charges that carried with them a year's worth of jail time and a $500 fine. It was only after a two-month long, surely-expensive legal battle that his parents were able to convince the prosecutor that giving someone a criminal record for using the freedom of speech we as a nation value so much wasn't such a good idea. Out of respect for what remains of the reader’s sanity at this point, this writer will leave it to you to delve into the details of the fourth grader suspended for pretending to make a classmate disappear with a replica of the One Ring of Lord Of The Rings fame (although I will say it’s a shock the administrators didn’t turn it over to Sauron).

If common sense were official policy in American schools, none of these incidents would ever happened. But common sense is not official policy. Zero tolerance, or the practice of deploying maximum punishment for certain offenses, is. Yes, a holdover from the anti-crime hysteria of the 80’s and 90’s remains the law in the halls of our schools, as any millennial will tell you. Following the lead of federal efforts to combat juvenile delinquency like the Gun Free School Zones Act of 1994, schools frantically implemented measures to meet the stringent requirements of such legislation, lest they lose federal funding for failing to live up to said requirements. While these policies were originally aimed at offenses involving firearms (and drugs shortly afterwards), mission creep, as is the case with many political and social courses of action done “for the children," inevitably set in and soon enough the children said policies were meant to protect were being expelled for bringing Alka-Seltzer and mouthwash to school. Whether the kid was a troublemaker or honors student, had malicious intent or not, didn’t enter the question: if you brought a bottle of Cherry 7-Up with a whisper of grain alcohol in it, you could kiss your Student Council membership, science fair awards, and spot on the cheerleading squad goodbye and say hello to a new school and boot camp. Some particularly brave schools, ever eager to test the waters, have even tried to extend their zero tolerance regimes well beyond their walls, with state and federal courts striking down several attempts to suspend students for mocking classmates and school staff on social media outside of the classroom.

Even so, this draconian style of discipline is not without it's defenders: supporters of zero tolerance policies maintain that they are necessary to not only punish serious offenses, but to also send a message that such behavior will not be tolerated, in the hope that other students will be deterred from engaging in the same behavior. The facts, however, tell a different story: according to a study by the Indiana Education Policy Center, there is "almost a complete lack of documentation linking zero tolerance with improved school safety," adding that, "The most extensive studies (Heaviside et al., 1998, Mayer & Leone, 1999) suggest a negative relationship between school safety measures and school safety." To be fair, the study was conducted in 2000, so additional research might have been done between since then that vindicates proponents of zero tolerance. Let's take a look at what the American Psychological Association found in it's study of zero tolerance policies, as summarized by Everyday Psychology: "It is assumed that the removal of disruptive students provides for a school climate more conducive to learning. In fact, the opposite is true. Schools in which expulsions and suspensions are common tend to have less satisfactory school climate ratings and are found to spend a disproportionate amount of time on disciplinary issues. And after taking into account the socioeconomic status of students, they tend to have lower academic achievement rates." What the APA is saying, effectively, is that zero tolerance is more trouble than it is worth, that the cure is worse than the illness.

Indeed, Ahmed Mohamed would have been just another, forgotten victim of this "cure" had people not rallied to his defense and condemned the school and police's handling of the situation. But sadly, too many students who face similarly excessive punishments slip through the cracks, remembered by few and mourned by even less. As Terri Burke, Executive Director of the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, put it, "Ahmed suffered through a terrifying, traumatizing, and unjust ordeal. Yet because of the mass exposure of what he endured, he's received invitations to the White House, Facebook headquarters, and the Google science fair... For too many others -- the ones whose stories won't go viral -- the possibility of the American nightmare remains too real." The moment Ahmed was handcuffed for showing his clock to a teacher was when many Americans saw the zero tolerance nightmare for what it is. It's up to them to wake up and end it now. 

The Silence And The Fury: Why Are Americans More Outraged About A Dead Lion Than Dead Civilians?

American jets en route to Syria.

It's that time again, where I share an article I wrote for HonorSociety.org! This one addresses something that I've been wondering about this past month: the disparity between the attention paid to the killing of Cecil The Lion and recent reports that hundreds of civilians have been killed in American-led airstrikes in Syria and Iraq. I know it's hard for people to keep abreast of such things, but I hope that in some small way this article will bring them up to speed and maybe even moved to take action. The article can be accessed here, and is reproduced in it's entirety below.

                   The Silence And The Fury: Why Are Americans More Outraged About A Dead Lion Than Dead Civilians

If you have access to the internet (and since you're reading this, you probably do), chances are you've heard about the death of Cecil, a Zimbabwean lion who was shot and killed by Minnesota dentist and recreational big game hunter Walter Palmer. Although it reasonably could have been expected that there might be a fair level of upset at someone killing an animal for sport rather than self defense, reports that Cecil was illegally lured from the nature reserve he lived on by Palmer and his guides for the express purpose of being able to kill him compounded the subsequent outrage by several orders of magnitude. Thousands took, as they are wont to do nowadays, to Twitter to express their sorrow over the loss of Cecil and their fury towards Palmer, among them a number of celebrities. None other than MC Hammer tweeted "Can't believe this man counted it as valor to lure #CecilTheLion out of his protective home and killed him. #Cowardice," while former CNN talking head Piers Morgan, who used his show as a platform to vigorously promote gun control, was more than willing to temporarily suspend his professed distaste for gun violence in the wake of Cecil's death, saying "I'd love to go hunting for killer dentist Dr. Walter Palmer, so I can stuff & mount him for MY office wall."

Less malevolent but equally unhinged was Sharon Osbourne's reaction, who, in her infinite wisdom, declared, "#WalterPalmer is Satan. I don't know how anyone could go to this man for dental services after this. He is a killer. Beware!" Never mind that there is a big difference between hunting, legally or illegally, a lion, and killing another human being in cold blood. No, us foolish mortals should heed Mrs. Osbourne's warning: any dentist who engages in recreational hunting is the 21st Century-equivalent of Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man! It would be unfair to say that everyone who was upset by Cecil's killing reacted hysterically, however. Some simply left stuffed animals on the sign adjacent to his dental clinic, a clear-but-harmless act of protest against Palmer's hunt. Of course, there were also people who left signs of their own on the door to the clinic, bearing such heartwarming messages as "ROT IN HELL" (their caps, not mine) and "PALMER (again, their caps, not mine), there's a deep cavity waiting for you!", to say nothing of the dozens of protestors waving signs and voicing their disgust outside the building.

What's interesting though is that, for all their outrage about the needless killing of a lion, this writer has yet to see any of these individuals condemn a much greater occurrence of bloodshed happening as we speak, an occurrence that one could credibly argue they bear greater responsibility and thus greater chance to affect change for. This occurrence is succinctly summarized by the Associated Press: "U.S.-led airstrikes targeting the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq have likely killed at least 459 civilians over the past year, a report by an independent monitoring group said Monday. The coalition had no comment." Apparently, neither did Cecil's newfound fans.

True, this number is not as shocking as the well over a million civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan within the past decade, but when you consider that the U.S. isn't officially at war with Syria or Iraq, you would think that it warrants many a raised eyebrow or at the very least a few sanctimonious celebrity tweets. For that matter, you would think that Americans would be incensed that the President can send the country's military into combat without getting a formal declaration of war from Congress (a power delegated expressly to them by Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution, mind you), but then again, they haven't passed one of those since World War II, so perhaps that's expecting too much. With this confidence-inspiring history in mind, it's no wonder that the Obama administration felt comfortable enough last August to begin pummeling Iraq and then Syria as part of it's improvised whack-a-mole strategy with the then-nascent Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (more commonly known as ISIS) and other assorted terrorist groups (Khorasan? Khorasan? Bueller?) This lovely state of affairs lasted for almost half a year before California Representative Adam Schiff finally introduced not a declaration of war but a resolution authorizing ongoing operations against ISIS (what passes for the second best thing) on behalf of the administration this past January. Predictably, however, the Republican-controlled Congress opposed the administration's proposed legislation, not because it was too open-ended but because it wasn't open-ended enough in their book, ultimately tabling the bill and leaving us where we started: bombing people far, far away while acting like we're not bombing people far, far away.

Perhaps the fact that this tragedy is happening so far from American shores would explain American's indifference or ignorance of it in times past, but in the digital age, where information travels around the world in seconds, this explanation doesn't hold water. Indeed, it would require that one not consider the fact that people who are not aware of civilian casualties of American air strikes somehow heard about Walter Palmer's hunt, an event as removed from the day-to-day life of the average American as overseas counter-terrorism operations are. Within a short period of time, they were able to both learn and form a strong (most likely negative) opinion about the killing of one of Zimbabwe's most famous lions whilst remaining in the dark about the Anbar marketplace struck by American aircraft, leaving 18 Iraqi civilians dead or the 7 women and children reportedly killed by a U.S. cruise missile in the Syrian province of Idlib. Given that these events happened separately over the course of a year, one might think there would have been more than enough time for Americans to learn and come out forcefully against these acts, and yet, any memory of these innocent Iraqis and Syrians was utterly eclipsed by the fury provoked by other unfortunate events, not least of which was the death of Cecil. What times we live in that we feel more sympathy for predatory felines than unarmed Muslims.

In fairness, it is difficult to feel for people killed by bombs dropped in your name when the people dropping the bombs refuse to acknowledge said people killed by said bombs. According to U.S. Central Command, there is "no operational reporting or intelligence" confirming civilian fatalities caused by American forces, anextraordinary claim to make when one considers that over 1,000 air strikes have been launched in Iraq and Syria by this point. One is reminded of the 2011 bombing of Libya, where NATO dropped over 7,000 bombs and missiles on that nation whilst claiming with a straight face that no civilians were harmed up until independent investigators traveled there to see for themselves and found that, lo and behold, not only were civilians killed, but that the total number of Libyans killed by NATO might have been even higher than they had expected. It's bad enough that we're bombing people and then acting like nothing happened, but to make matters worse, our anti-ISIS strategy appears to consist of just that: making matters worse. After resisting the idea for years, President Obama asked and got permission last year to train and arm Syrians fighting against the government of Bashar Al-Assad and ISIS. One year and one million dollars later, five of the seventy rebels trained by the U.S. have been captured by the Al-Nusra Front - that is, Al Qaeda's affiliate in Syria. Several others have disappeared, hopefully not into the folds of ISIS, against which, need I remind you, we trained and armed them.

Then there is the question of Assad: what happens when our proxies come (as they undoubtedly will) into conflict with the regime's forces? The answer, as it turns out, is bomb him too, which would almost certainly lead to his fall and in all likelihood ISIS parading through the streets of Damascus and onward to Baghdad, Beirut, or even Tel Aviv, if they're feeling bold enough. Before you shrug your shoulders and dismiss this as something that only effects the people unfortunate enough to live there: per the Pentagon's own admission, a little over 4,000 American soldiers are currently stationed in Iraq. Yes, they are supposed to serve in strictly advisory roles, and yes, President Obama has stressed that he will not send them directly into combat, but the cynics among us (i.e. this writer) can't help but recall similar promises and assurances from another liberal, Democrat president: Lyndon B. Johnson, who infamously declared on the campaign trail that he would not send "American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves" and then proceeded to drag the nation into the bloody quagmire that was the Vietnam War, traumatizing an entire generation of Americans, devastating the lives of millions of Vietnamese, and costing him his presidency. 

Almost 60 years after the Sixties, we find ourselves facing one of the major issues that defined that decade. The president is waging war off-the-books and in contravention of the Constitution, and Congress, instead of reining him in, has essentially given their tacit blessing to his actions. The only difference is that impressionable young college students haven't taken to the streets in protest, although that is liable to change when the war inevitably goes downhill and our body count comes closer (however marginally) to matching the other side's. Perhaps then, they will take some of that passion that led modern-day slacktivists to send dentists that shoot lions menacing messages and use it to wave picket signs outside the Pentagon or rush to the polling stations next year to vote the bums responsible for this mess out. If that's too much however, we can always settle for Sharon Osbourne accusing people of being the Devil on Twitter.

Of Stars and Bars: Why Purging The Confederate Flag From American Life Accomplishes Nothing

The Confederate battle flag outside the South Carolina Capitol before it was taken down.

My latest post for HonorSociety.org, about the Charleston shooting and the Confederate flag, has been posted! Here it is reprinted in it's entirety, with the original post viewable  here:

                 Of Stars and Bars: Why Purging The Confederate Flag From American Life Accomplishes Nothing

On July 10th, almost a month after 21-year old Dylan Roof went on a shooting spree in a historically-black Charleston church that left 9 innocent people dead, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley oversaw the removal of the infamous battle flag flown by the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War from the dome of the State House in Columbia. Erroneously believed by many to have been the national flag of the Confederacy, the battle flag is seen by some as a good-natured symbol of Southern heritage and remembrance of ancestors who gave their lives during the war and by many as an odious reminder of slavery and unrepentant racism. Considering that Roof not only owned one but proudly displayed it sometime before his assault on the Charleston church, one might be more inclined to side with the later group's interpretation of the flag. Indeed, it may be true that a significant number of Southern soldiers during the war might have viewed it as a fight for independence rather than slavery, but this has no more bearing on the negative associations one might have of the flag than the fact that a significant number of German soldiers during the Second World War neither believed in nor supported National Socialism minimizes the negative associations one might have of the Iron Cross often worn by bikers and surfers today. For this reason, it is best that the divisive and yes, offensive nature of the flag be recognized and that the flag be removed from  governmentbuildings like South Carolina's State House.

Unfortunately, as it is with all-too many political and social controversies, the story did not end there. A few weeks before the flag came down from the state capitol, Apple announced that it would  remove apps that featured it  from it's App Store. Although it claimed it would only go after apps that used the flag in malicious ways, Apple  proceeded to  remove four strategy games that used it in the "educational or historical" manner it purported to make an exception for. Around the same time, Warner Bros. announced that it would  no longer produce models and replicas of The General Lee of The Dukes of Hazzard fame  bearing the so-called Confederate flag on it's roof. Shortly afterwards, TV Land, apparently unable or unwilling to remove the car's flag from the  program itself, pulled the whole show from syndication over the matter. Not to be outdone, Ebay announced that given the flag's status as a "contemporary symbol of divisiveness and racism", they would no longer allow vendors to sell the flag and merchandise bearing it on their website. Following Ebay's example in short order were  Amazon, Walmart, and Sears, with each company pulling the offending item from their shelves and webpages. This anti-Confederate flag frenzy reached some truly absurd heights, with one online commentator claiming that several teenagers complained that they carried guitars displaying the flag at the store he worked at. He posted a picture of one of the guitars in question, a limited edition Epiphone  emblazoned with the Union Jack in commemoration of the 1960's British Invasion. Fortunately, it doesn't seem enough teens have complained about said guitar for Epiphone to cease production of them.

Interestingly though, one could make the case that these teens had even more reason to complain about the Union Jack than the Stars and Bars, especially if they came from or had family from parts of the world where the "British Invasion" probably means something very different from Ed Sullivan introducing John, Paul, George and Ringo to American television audiences for the first time. Indeed, until half a century ago that flag represented an empire that not only lorded over people of color from northernmost Canada to the Indian subcontinent but also regularly bombed and gassed said people  whenever they challenged or appeared to challenge their rule. Would it be at all surprising if at the very least some Africans, Native Americans, Arabs, and Indians looked upon that flag and felt emotions similar to the ones American blacks likely do when they see the Confederate flag? To return to the example of the Iron Cross referenced earlier, while Ebay purged it's site of the battle flag, it still continues to host necklaces, pendants, rings, coins, and even medals once worn by soldiers of the Wehrmacht as it rampaged across Europe. Furthermore, one can still easily buy merchandise displaying the more explicitly-offensive swastika. True, most of the items in question are antiques, but one is left to scratch their head why a similar exception wasn't made for the equally-offensive yet equally-historical Confederate flag. But it wasn't a Union Jack, an Iron Cross, or even a swastika that Dylan Roof posed in pictures with before murdering those people, it might be countered: it was the Stars and Bars! That may be so, but Roof also posed in at least one picture wearing a jacket with the  flags of apartheid-era South Africa, a regime which arguably held  the dubious honor of making Jim Crow look comparatively benign, and  Rhodesia, a former British colony that waged a  brutal, decade-long war against it's native black population  after independence. Despite the fact that these flags have comparable or even stronger racist associations than the Confederate flag, they still remain available for purchase on Ebay. 

I am not saying that Ebay or any other company should be forced to sell products bearing any of these symbols: as private businesses, they are free to carry or not carry whatever they please. I am also definitely not saying that they should remove merchandise bearing said  symbols as they did with the Confederate flag: that is completely contrary to the point I am making. The point I am making is that the fact that Roof actively sought out clothing bearing the South African and Rhodesian flags when most Americans would just give you a confused look when you ask them to point to South Africa on a map and what Zimbabwe used to be called reveals that he was so strongly invested in white supremacist ideology that he would cling to those beliefs even if society worked to scrub anything bearing the whiff of racism in American media and merchandise away. More than likely, he would have just become more deeply involved in white supremacist sub-subculture, where this see-no-evil attitude would be cited as proof that their ideas are so alluring to white Americans that the authorities have to censor them. In the shadows, this misplaced sense of persecution would likely metastasize into even more malignant forms of hate, and by extension, more violent forms of it as well, directly leading to more Dylan Roofs and more massacres. Instead of averting ours and others' eyes from racist symbolism and driving peddlers of it into the protective shroud of the dark, we should allow them to express their bigoted beliefs as we would non-bigoted ones, where others can shine a light on the absurdity of such beliefs and expose their incoherence to members of the public. Case in point is Roof himself. During his confession, he admitted to police  that he "almost didn't go through with [the shooting] because everyone was so nice to him." We all know what followed, but for a moment, the Charleston shooter doubted the morality of his murderous mission, and it wasn't because somebody confiscated his jacket with the Rhodesian flag or TV Land stopped airing The Dukes of Hazzard: it was because some of the people he irrationally hated showed him kindness and humanity, thus undermining the fundamental tenets of his racist ideology. Perhaps things would have turned out differently had Roof experienced more moments like these before that tragic day.