George Orwell said: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

Well, to be fair, Orwell himself didn’t say it. His beleaguered character, Winston Smith, thought it. He thought it in relation to the government willfully erasing the facts of the past and replacing them with convenient lies they passed off as truths.

Erasing the past: what a concept.

All things considered, history is an ugly place. It’s where the cruelest acts of man reside, in the form of concepts like slavery, torture, persecution and the many atrocities of untold wars. Surely, if we could just scrub away that grim past, we could forget it once and for all. Surely, if those dark memories were gone, the future would be nothing but bright.

It doesn’t work that way, of course, but plenty of you believe it does.

This flap about the Confederate flag was something I had hoped to stay out of, but fat chance of that happening. When the media gets their fangs into something like this, they insist on dumping it on your doorstep hour after hour and day after day until you know it intimately, whether you want to or not. Pundit after pundit appears to tell the rest of us that the Rebel flag is a symbol of violence and persecution and that flying it is a display of hate, pure and simple. Period. No ifs, ands or buts.

And just like that, the iconic image is fading from view. It’s disappearing from flagpoles over government buildings and from store shelves and online listings. Everywhere there was once a depiction of the Confederate flag, there is now nothing. It’s been erased, and if you’re not wondering what will be next, you’re not giving it enough thought.

Where do you draw the line here? Considering all the hateful things pirates have done over the centuries, should we ban the Jolly Roger? The Union Jack? When you consider the harsh way our forebears treated the natives, shouldn’t the U.S. flag also be discouraged from flying? For that matter, all countries on Earth have at least some history of violence and repression, so maybe it’s time for flags of all kinds to go. Because that’s how you eradicate hate, right? By outlawing symbols?

We’re reaching new levels of absurdity here, collectively calling for the elimination of things like “Dukes of Hazzard” memorabilia, as if Bo, Luke and Daisy were personally responsible for all of the world’s woes. And if they get the boot, what does that mean for people like Lynard Skynard, Charlie Daniels, or anyone, really, who embraces the Confederate flag as a symbol of Southern resilience rather than of bigotry and malice? Are we going to punish the many for the actions of a few?

Where do we go from here? Do we ban images or references to the Founding Fathers because some of them owned slaves? What about our national anthem, written in a time when slavery was still a way of life?

It’s not a very big leap from banning a flag to banning public protests or other expressions of free speech. You believe it is, but it is not. Erosion of rights tends to come incrementally, in little bites rather than in one big gulp. First Amendment zones are popping up here and there. The assault on the English language has grown to include words like “brown bag lunch” and “melting pot.” And now the war on emblems has begun, as though removing belt buckles, bumper stickers and hats will eliminate hate from the hearts of men.

These symbols have only the power we give them, but here we are, reacting with fear and loathing as though the emblem itself might rise up to devour us. The media (and the forces behind them) have stirred us to madness once again. They call on us to react to the various causes of the day and we just keep scrambling to get on board. Because nobody wants to be THAT GUY. You either join the chorus of voices screaming about this injustice or that one, or you risk being branded a racist, a hate-monger, a terrorist.

They’ve got us trained like poodles and if we continue down this road, the next generation won’t have any idea at all where they came from. Keep whittling words from the language, symbols from the landscape and thoughts from our heads, and all of our history lessons will one day be as phony as the Build-a-Bear your kid slapped together at the mall.

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces,” poor Winston Smith observed, “and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

This is our brave new world, where anything that’s offensive to some must be offensive to all, and just you never mind that First Amendment, which was created in large part to protect offensive ideas. This is how we are now, so utterly afraid of offending someone that we’d rather try to rewrite history than let it happen.

We move from one cause to the next as we’re instructed, getting into loud debates that aren’t really debates at all. And while we’re fighting over this 150-year-old symbol with its multitude of meanings, people in high places are fast-tracking a secretive, multinational trade deal that REALLY deserves our attention. It’s a classic diversionary tactic and we fall for it EVERY SINGLE TIME.

It’s sickening. It’s frustrating and it’s depressing. We’re being played and nobody seems to see it. Sometimes I want to just stop thinking about it so I can be played, too. Life is easier, you know, when you just go along to get along.

Maybe I should just hoist the white flag and wave it, but you know what? Sooner or later, they’ll get around to deeming that a symbol of hate, too. Because once you start sliding down the slippery slope, it’s damn near impossible to get back up again.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. Oldspeakers can email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.

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