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Ken Burns says US civil war still relevant
... Everything that has come before us — our history — has delivered us to this moment. ... As we struggle to understand the horrific church shootings in Charleston, the birthplace of succession, or in Ferguson, in Missouri, where the greatest loss of civilian life over the issue of slavery took place in the history of the United States, what can we learn from the past that will help us put into perspective what's going now? And you find often, not always, that race is a particularly hot-button issue for people to talk about ...... The Confederate flag came into use after 1954. It went into state flags, Southern state flags and in other places, and the only thing that happened in 1954 that I recall was Brown vs Board of Education. ... What that means is that the use of the Confederate flag, on the back of pickup trucks, flying in the yard of the state capitol in Columbia, South Carolina, is resistance to Civil Rights (and) saying actually we don't believe what the Americans were founded on, that all men are created equal ...
Ferguson was a boiling pot for an awfully long time before (Michael) Brown was killed. That's something that people have to understand and that's what historians do. We don't just take this sort of hot, incandescent moment and say, 'Ah, this is all it is.' You sort of average out all the stuff that's been going on and try to come to some understanding about it" ...
The reason why the rhetoric has gotten so exceptionally vitriolic is because there're so many people vying for attention. It's me, me, me, me, me and that reflects an essential narcissism on the part of our political process. We live in a narcissistic culture, we have these things called reality shows, which are the exact opposite of reality and you have (Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump) running for president who is an experienced reality show (person), a narcissist of the first order and he's appealing to that narcissistic side in people ...
http://www.houmatoday.com/article/20150904/APE/309049769?Template=bigfun
