In light of recent events
Remember how we commented on this cartoon?
Well, it's a re-edit of another....
http://m.snopes.com/2015/06/29/splc-confederate-gay-flag-comic/Someone took a cartoon involving just the Confederate Battle Flag and reworked it into a cartoon about the backlash against the Confederate flag & the victory for Same-Sex marriage.
That said, I still like the re-working because, I find it powerful & beautiful and it echoes the moment when the USSR fell and The Cold War ended. I remember seeing on TV, a night time shot of a flagpole, with the Soviet flag being lowered and the new Russian one being raised in it's place. It looked exactly like this above cartoon. The old stodgy, repressive order being replaced by the (in the perspective of 1991-92, anyway) illustrious and new....ripe with possibilities.
.....Of course, some (particularly Russians) might see that as tragic but in the early 1990s, to me and many in the West, this was cool. As a teen, I may have been a tad naive, politically, but I had no idea how things would turn out in the Eastern Bloc. I knew of Peristroika & Glastnost, a country that was considered oppressive falling, The Cold War ending, Germany becoming one country & The Berlin Wall falling, The Solidarity Movement in Poland, The overthrow & execution of Ceauseceu, and a bunch of other stuff. I didn't really know what Communism was, I just knew it as that oppressive Stalinist stuff.
There was a certain political innocence in the 1990's. It seemed to me that things were going to simmer down and get better, that the worst was over, that we learned the lessons of Vietnam, That The Cold War was dead, Russia was our new friend, things were more Progressive & the band,
Jesus Jones sang "Right Here, Right Now"....any other political turmoil would be minor in the big scheme of things. The horrors of the war in the former Yugoslavia was a tiny, isolated thing, I felt bad for them but in the big scheme of things, it wasn't huge.
I had no idea that the GOP was turning wingnut. I didn't pay attention to all that jazz about Reagan, "Trickle-Down Economics", Union-busting or whatever.
Bill Clinton would succeed Bush Sr. & apart from a silly sex scandal, he'd come out okay and America was finally in "the black", there were "Green Aesops" & Captain Planet cartoons. It seemed everybody was waking up & headed for a more hopeful future.
On 9/11, the innocence was completely shattered. Then Bush Jr. came, another "Vietnam", America "in the red" again, the wingnuts made themselves known, security measures up the wazoo & basically some rollbacks on human rights & a new "Gilded Age".
When the Obergefell vs. Hodges ruling came and people like Sanders, Clinton & Webb running, I've become hopefull again. Most of America wants a change and we're waking up. The old hopefulness of the Nineties has returned and, since it's a Presidential Election year, ton of American are going to turn out at the polls.
Perhaps the U.S.A. is finally coming out of the woods!
