I guess it is a stupid way to get your idea across... and it does tend to alienate people.

[MADem]

185. You are the one who keeps mentioning them. Look at all the posts you have made on the topic.

Yet you're only able to come up with one guy in New York, eleven years after Rosa Parks. Look at how many posts you have made, in this thread alone, on these black civil rights flag burners? Now, you're nitpicking words, when you had to dig like hell to find one person? Please.

Don't tell me what I remember--you weren't there, you thought the civil rights movement was about "class" and not equal rights and access regardless of race, and YOU are the only one on this thread claiming that civil rights protesters ran around burning flags. Never mind that you killed off poor James Meredith! That wasn't a small mistake either. If you're looking for people who were murdered, try Medgar Evers for starters.

Your repeated suggestions (...the oppressed are not the wealthy. To say class has nothing to do with oppression is just silly) that all black people, who--all of them, WERE oppressed, were all "not wealthy" is just incredibly ignorant of the facts. How do you think black people got medical and dental care during segregation? Do you think they paid their black doctors, nurses, and dentists with chickens or something? Where do you think they got their news? From black newspapers and magazines, run by black owners and editors. They patronized black-owned entertainment and restaurant-bar establishments whose owners made money hand over fist. Many black landlords were quite well off. Many black businessmen (and women--read up on Madam CJ Walker sometime) made a fine living despite the indignities and constraints of segregation. Black people came in all economic flavors, poor, working class, middle class--and yes, RICH.

You keep digging a hole for yourself. You're over your head already.

Your suggestion that segregation did not apply to "wealthy people" is just insane. They didn't care how much money you had if your skin was the "wrong" color. That was the whole POINT of the civil rights movement.

And now, you're off to Northern Ireland in a desperate attempt to save this argument? Please. Let's drag THEM into the conversation, too, why don't we? No--let's not.

Again, I re-invite your focus to the OP, because that is what this thread is about. Rosa Parks is not the equivalent of some unnamed punk who stole a flag in Oakland and set it on fire. There is no equivalence, and to pretend so is offensive.

If you can't make your case for that pyromaniac in Oakland without having to hide behind black people and the civil rights struggle, you have lost the argument.