Editor’s Note - We ain’t fergettin’

A friend of mine noticed a touching passage in state Sen. Jeff Mullis’ bill to declare April “Confederate History and Heritage Month.”</
It would honor “all those millions of [Georgia’s] citizens of various races and ethnic groups and religions who contributed in sundry and myriad ways to the cause of Southern Independence.”</
“Sundry and myriad.” I like that.</
You see, he doesn’t just want to honor the Southern whites who fought to keep slavery legal. Mullis wants to thank all the African-Americans, Mexicans, Pakistanis, Thais, Ethiopians, and Outer and Inner Mongolians who must have joined Southern whites in taking up arms against the United States in the noble cause of preserving the right to treat human beings as farm animals.</
How politically correct.</
A week earlier, some of our state’s leaders accused the NAACP of rehashing ancient history when the civil rights organization suggested that the state officially apologize for slavery. Now Mullis says he’d happily add some sort of slavery apology to his pro-Confederate bill. That’s mighty white of him. Sort of like: “We apologize for that slavery thing, but we sure do wish we got to keep doing it.”</
While lawmakers spend their time rehashing a war that ended 142 years ago, they’re doing very little to solve such problems as underfunded schools, Atlanta’s traffic mess and the fact that 1.7 million Georgians don’t have health insurance.</
In the land of cotton, old times truly aren’t forgotten. But the clock doesn’t just get turned back to the 19th century. With a bill to require professors to take a political litmus test, some lawmakers seem to be raising the ghost of demagogue Gov. Eugene Talmadge, who nearly destroyed the University of Georgia with academic witch hunts. In his proposal to throw more than 20,000 kids from working-class families off the state’s PeachCare program, Gov. Sonny Perdue is attempting to turn the clock back just a decade – to the time before PeachCare existed.</
It shouldn’t be surprising that Sonny and his party have gotten the state’s gears stuck in reverse. They swept into office while lambasting his predecessor’s push to take the Confederate battle emblem off the state flag. The romance of Tara just pairs so well with reactionary politics. It keeps conservative whites distracted while they’re stuck in traffic and their kids are getting kicked off health insurance.</
But there’s one problem with that approach: reality. Georgia circa 2007 ain’t Alabama circa 1957. Our problems are different. Our potential is different. Our people are different ... all sundry and myriad variations of them.