Some of my ancestors were assholes.
No.
Strike that.
Many of my ancestors were assholes.
This only stands to reason. Hundreds of generations, along the march of time, divided by the likelihood of any individual human being displaying asshole traits.
The math is inescapable. I have to come from a long line of assholes.
And because assholes are assholes, some of them had to be truly epic assholes.
Assholes of the sort that made life intolerable for others. Assholes of the sort who justified being assholes, who were proud of being assholes, who represented being assholes as a virtue. Who taught their children to be assholes.
You can make a pretty obvious logical leap here and conclude from all this that I am likely an asshole myself, at least part of the time.
Well, duh. Of course I am.
But there is one kind of asshole I’m not.
I take no particular pride in any of my ancestors being assholes.
I do not honor my ancestors for being assholes.
I do not advertise my pride in the past generations of assholes on the bumper of my car.
I do not put up billboards and raise flags to show my pride in the assholes in my family’s past.
I do not sing songs about my family aspiring to someday prove themselves to be assholes of the very same kind.
I do not teach the next generation that they should be assholes too.
I do none of that.
Why would I?
What do you think I am? Some kind of asshole?
Comment By: Chuck Gatlin
June 23rd, 2015 at 10:23 am
Even an asshole can do something worthy of being honored. Some of my ancestors owned slaves, some didn’t.
When I was a teenager with a Confederate flag in my room and a favorite shirt with an embroidered Confederate flag patch above the pocket, I wasn’t honoring any of those ancestors for living in an era when the corruption of slavery pervaded the economics of the whole country (see Mrs. Stowes’most famous book); I was honoring those people for defending their homeland, at risk of their lives, as they saw fit.
I don’t display that flag these days, because it riles up too many people. But I don’t profile individuals who do, because I know that sort of profiling is as stupidly prejudicial as any behavior exhibited by the KKK.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
June 23rd, 2015 at 11:04 am
Saying that the Confederate Flag flown today is a celebration of bad history — or “assholes,” as I say — is hardly “as” stupidly prejudicial as, to name some notorious KKK behaviors of the past, lynching people.
Comment By: Liz Williams
June 23rd, 2015 at 5:18 pm
I’m not going to go there, but for long and complicated reasons, without getting into competing theological worldviews, I think I may have been several assholes in previous incarnations. I’m trying not to be one now. And may fail.