I live seven miles down the road in a little sleepy community, South Range, Michigan. The local hunting, fishing, skiing, driving snowmobiles, and out door type things seem to be the activities that permeate the culture. On a cold winter day in March, a foot or two of snow was still on the ground in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I lounged on the couch at a cozy seventy-two degrees inside, taking occasional glances out the window at the frigid weather and imagining the coldness. Channel surfing for news events, especially on the Presidential elections, I caught a quick flash of the Governor of Texas. "It's a state issue, I think the good people of South Carolina can handle their own affairs," the Governor of Texas emphatically pronounced as the battle for the Presidency heated up in the spring of 2000. This issue of the state of South Carolina flying a confederate flag over its state capitol heated up the country with debates across the media and American college campuses, Heritage or Hate, States' Rights or Federal Government intrusion and so on. I thought to myself, "What is wrong with this guy! He just isolated a majority of the black community, and sadly, I will be under an oath as a military officer to this guy if he wins the election."         Did this guy's handlers brief him on the grief the confederate flag had brought on the military a few years back? In one of American's most elite military units, the 82nd Airborne Division, a pair of soldiers affiliated with the skin heads killed a black couple in Fayetteville, North Carolina in 1995, and it caused a series of investigations within the military that caused confederate flags and other racist symbols to be removed from soldiers' common areas on military posts. The two soldiers had confederate flags prominently hanging in their rooms and other hate material. In 1997, inside of another one of the world's largest and elite combat forces located down in Hinesville, Georgia, the Commander, 3rd Infantry Division, General John Hendrix, unceremoniously relieved his Command Sergeant Major, the highest ranking enlisted man in the division, for passing out Klan literature which included pictures and confederate flag artifacts. Even as I write, I don't know if Governor Bush understands that the confederate flag and its symbolism were diametrically opposed to the symbolism of the United States flag.