Here's a White guy about to stab a Black guy in the chest with an American Flag.

[MADem]

100. All I can say is consider the source.

The "used car salesman" rhetoric didn't go over any better than this "interpretation" of history. Can't do much about it, except perhaps correct the record.

Anyone who refuses to take the word of both the photographer AND the victim of the attack is being willfully obtuse. I am not even going to speculate as to why--there's really no explanation for it. Facts DO matter. I'm no journalist, but I think it's important to try to be as accurate as possible when relaying the background of an historical event. Ted Landsmark was beaten up by others, not the jerk with the flag. The flag never touched Ted--he says as much. The guy swinging (not stabbing) the flag doesn't live in Southie anymore and hasn't for years (he went on the lam for awhile after he was suspected of killing someone with a blunt instrument--if he did the crime, he got away with it; it may have been a "snitches get stitches" kind of thing because there was insufficient proof to bring charges). He's a Mainer and he lives not all that far from the Bush compound--so I'm guessing, since Jeb! is building a house on the compound, that he'll be back on the watch list--if he was ever taken off.

I remember this event--I was in the City of Boston when it happened--I went back overseas a few months after this happened, but the whole busing business pervaded the atmosphere in a rather corrosive way.

Some people likened the image to that of Crispus Attacks, the first casualty of the Revolution, gunned down by the British. The long gun and the misappropriated "Old Glory" being reversed, but with a similar energy:



I think the focus should be on South Carolina and the people who had their lives snatched from them by a racist asshole, who will meet justice eventually. I "get" the point that racism is everywhere, hell, I've seen enough of it in my long life, but I don't think that elevating the shitty behavior of a racist punk teen in 1976, to somehow "equate" it to the mass-murderous behavior of a young - appearing adult racist who shot a bunch of people in a church is terribly on the mark.

That's just my lousy opinion, though.