Why this flag needs to be banned.

After 155 years, it's time for this flag to disappear because of what it represents.

I have a confession to make. I used to own a Confederate flag.

More accurately known as the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, it's the flag that is most commonly associated with the Confederate States of America, the breakaway republic of seven, 12 or 13 Southern states (even they aren't really sure how many there were after all these years) that existed between 1861 and 1865 before the Union Army, backed by the financial and industrial might of the Northern states, finally put an end to the rebellion, and essentially, ended legalized slavery.

Of course, the outcome of that war did not end racism -- a fact that is painfully evident 155 years after the fact. But I digress.

I was the product of an inter-regional marriage -- the son of Tony Farinella, a Northerner who was the son of Sicilian immigrants, and Jeanne Chambers, a native Floridian whose family tree can be traced back to the earliest English and Irish settlers of Georgia and Florida. My paternal grandfather came to America at the turn of the 20th century and my dad (the first native-born American in the family) served in the US Navy in World War II, and while I'm not sure if any members of the Chambers or Paulk families fought in the Civil War, at least my maternal grandfather, Buford William Chambers, fought in the US Army in World War I and had to endure respiratory problems for much of his life because of the Germans' use of mustard gas. His son and my uncle, Buford Jr., served with the Army in Korea -- and suffered from PTSD for the rest of his life because of it.

So I come from a family of loyal Americans, but also a family steeped in different cultures. While my mother relocated to Massachusetts after the end of the war, she and my father made annual pilgrimages to the little hamlet of Williston, Fla., until the mid-1970s -- and I was along for the ride during the tumultuous 1960s, when the push for civil rights legislation was at its peak.

The crossroads of Williston, Fla., in the 1960s.

Williston was a little town that had become isolated from the world when Interstate 75 plowed through about 20 miles to the east. Businesses closed along US routes 41 and 27 because vacationers' traffic no longer flowed past them, so Williston was practically a ghost town when I'd visit every April. I didn't know too many people my own age and I didn't want to hang around my grandparents' house all day, so I would just go for walks -- long, long walks through the crumbling downtown of one-story buildings (all painted white), across the tracks and all the way up to the Holiday Inn at the top of the hill, and then back down, past Williston High and the Methodist Church, the A&P, the gas stations that had machines selling 5-cent bottles of Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper, through the town again until I reached the railroad tracks that my grandmother said I shouldn't cross.

And why not? Well, that was where the black folk lived. Of course, that wasn't the word my grandmother used. She didn't use the six-letter word that has become one of the most offensive words in the English language, nor did she use the five-letter word that was considered proper for the time. It was sort of an amalgamation of the two, one that sounded proper to the white folks but still carried the inference of superiority and disdain.

Don't get me wrong, I loved my grandparents. But they were the products of a culture of which I wasn't a part. And even as a pre-teen, I knew my grandmother never really accepted my father, a swarthy "Eye-talian." When I came out of the womb as blond and fair-skinned, it was Bessie Chambers' most fervent wish to turn her grandson into "her special little Cracker," which was a phrase I never accepted long before I learned of its racist overtones.

I've never really been "down" with racism or prejudice. When I was a first-grader and riding the school bus from Mansfield to Dominican Academy in Plainville, I remember an older boy on the bus saying to me, "You know you're a Wop, right?" Of course, I had no idea what in the hell he was talking about. That popular slur for Italian immigrants was not discussed within the Farinella family. So when I quizzically said, "I'm a Wop?" and the older boy said, "Yeah, but you're a good Wop," and started laughing derisively, I thought about it for a few seconds -- and then swung my metal lunchbox around in a 360-degree arc and clipped him off the top of his head with it. Wham!

That got me thrown off the bus despite my father's very spirited defense that I was responding to an act of prejudice. As a result, my parents had to drive me to and from the school for the next five years.

The third storefront down was the 

entrance to the theater in Williston.

Back to Williston -- one thing I noticed during my mid-1960s strolls around the town was that there were two entrances to practically every building. It was especially obvious at the little movie theater in the building at the corner of North Main Street and what's now NE 1st Avenue. White people entered through the North Main Street entrance, while the African-American patrons had to enter in the "colored" entrance around the corner and stay clustered in a tight little area away from the rest of the movie viewers.

The first door was the "colored"

entrance to the theater in Williston.

And yes, there were "colored" water fountains (we call those "bubblers") and so on. And it was all a puzzle to me. I may not have been exposed to a lot of black people in my youth -- Mansfield was and remains predominantly white, although the old Yankees didn't want the Italians to move south from their enclave near the chocolate factory until we started marrying their daughters. But living and growing up in this bastion of liberalism, at least I learned about what the struggle for civil rights was all about. And that's how I came upon the realization that while my grandparents weren't overtly racist, and even interacted positively with many black people, I never got the feeling that they fully accepted them as equals.

Me at 6 years old with the new US flag.

And that brings me to the Confederate flag. It was about the size of the American flags that are placed at the gravesites of veterans. My father's grave has a sparkling new Old Glory next to it right now, in fact. I'm not sure exactly when I got this particular flag, but it was probably around 1960, about the same time the new 50-star US flag was introduced. We probably picked it up at a Stuckey's stand somewhere along US 301 heading south -- those roadside stores had tons of souvenirs as well as pecan candies and a very tasty coconut milk mix -- and I thought nothing of it because even though the flag was the symbol of a failed rebellion against the United States government, the former Confederate states still embraced it as a symbol of their "Lost Cause" to preserve a way of life (i.e., slavery).

For a while as a youth, I put it in my room, hung next to Old Glory, as a representation of my mixed heritage. Then it got put away, then it was rediscovered, and it followed me through moves from four different addresses to my apartment in a house bordering Bungay Lake (Greenwood Lake on your maps) in North Attleboro. 

My first boat on Bungay was my family's original 8-foot aluminum skiff, to which I attached a 3 HP outboard so I could motor very slowly around the lake and visit friends at the other end. And on the Fourth of July, boat owners on the lake would decorate their crafts in patriotic colors and parade along the shores, so I joined in -- adorning the little skiff with several American flags and one notable exception -- the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia that I had purchased 40 years earlier.

Needless to say, it was not received well by my fellow lake residents. And I couldn't figure out why. So I asked my friends at the other end of the lake, and the response was quick and adamant. "It's because of that fucking racist flag you were flying!" 

At first, I didn't get it. After all, it was just a part of history to which my family had a tangential attachment. I didn't really see the bigger picture. And also, in the town of Walpole just a few miles away, the high school's athletic teams were proudly called the "Rebels," and until 1994, the Confederate flag had adorned the side of the football helmets because their very successful coach, John Lee (called "the General"), had come to the school from Tennessee and brought the imagery along with him.

(As an aside, the "Rebels" name has become much more controversial in Walpole in recent years. Later this week, in fact, the Walpole School Committee will discuss whether the nickname should be dropped entirely in the wake of the nationwide reaction to racism following the murder of George Lloyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis. It's probably long overdue.)

After my friends' pointed comment, it didn't take me too long to realize what the Confederate flag truly represented. So it went back into a storage bin and was never unfurled again. My next boat, a 14-footer with a 40-horse engine, never displayed anything but our true colors.

Almost 20 years have passed since that episode, and the Confederate flag has undergone a rebirth of sorts. It has been further co-opted by hate groups that wave it along with the swastika-bearing flags of World War II Nazi Germany as a symbol of white supremacy. And yet these evil sons of bitches also wrap themselves in Old Glory as if being a detestable racist and admiring the most evil government in the history of the planet are comparable to American values.

And what does President Donald Trump say? "There were good people on both sides," he said after the Charlottesville marches. 

And he objects to the growing call for US military bases named after Confederate generals to change their names. It is rather curious that we would, as a nation, be so forgiving to those that rebelled against it that we would honor the traitors that led the rebellion. But in the context of the times, it was seen as a healing gesture. Still, despite the desire to forgive the sins of the past, there was also an undercurrent of racism (fueled by the Ku Klux Klan's influence over Southern politics) that prodded the move to create longing remembrances to "the Lost Cause."

Today, racism exists everywhere. I was driving somewhere locally the other day and I was passed by a pickup truck plastered with "Trump 2020" stickers and more than one Confederate flag applique. And it was registered in Massachusetts, the bluest of blue states in the union. Yes, I am reminded that this is also the state where a photograph was taken that preserves for all time the image of a white man using Old Glory on a staff as a weapon against a black man during the South Boston busing riots. Nobody in his or her right mind is proud of that. Fortunately, this state generally rejects the underbelly at the ballot box.

Which is why we, as a nation, need to act.

Even the Germans had the good sense to ban display and manufacture of Nazi flags following their defeat in World War II. But we Americans had the weird notion that we could somehow embrace the imagery of the conflict that tore the nation in two. And what was that conflict about? So one group of people could persecute another group just because of the color of their skin. One country put 6 million Jews to death. The other has persecuted generations of black people, even without the presence of slavery. And we're the good guys?

I'm all for a purging of the Confederacy. No statues. No flags. No honored "heroes" of the Civil War. For the same reason why we don't have a "Fort Benedict Arnold," it's time to change the names of military bases to honor the names of those that fought to preserve American democracy as practiced in a united nation.

That's not to "erase history," as some pro-Confederacy zealots claim. All of it should be preserved, in museums and accurately-written history books that illustrate the inherent evils of the Southern cause. It should be preserved not for glorification, but for instruction's sake. 

And with that, I have no problem with outlawing symbols of the insurrection. In the United States of America, there is no need to wave any flag other than the 50-star, 13-stripe banner of unity. Even those states of the former Confederacy that still cling to a similar design for their state flags should be so ordered to come up with a new design post haste.

I suppose someone will claim that Congress would be violating the First Amendment of the Constitution over the expression of free speech. There are those better than I that could and would argue that hate speech, and hate symbols, are not protected by the First Amendment. Let that battle ensue.

As I type this, however, I still wondered what happen to my Confederate flag.

I'm pretty sure that I rediscovered it in 2015 when I moved back into my childhood home and gutted it of what had filled it for the previous 60 years. I think that I found it in the garage and unfurled it, looked at it for a few seconds and let out a dismissive "hmmmph," and then flung it into the 40-foot-long dumpster in the driveway that would take all the junk away.

But I'm not absolutely certain. And because I've been dealing with a few issues that have restricted my mobility of late, I haven't had the desire to search for it. But I promise you, if I do find it rolled up in a long-forgotten cabinet space, I will set a match to it and record the moment for all of you to see.

It is not the flag that represents me and the America I love.