I find the California state flag offensive and racist. You see, the guys up in Sonoma who designed it back in 1846 said they wanted a flag that “didn’t look Mexican.” So maybe we should drop our flag and design something for today. History be damned.

Maybe we shouldn’t call the liquid we pump out of the ground and refine, “black gold.” There must be a politically correct title we can use besides just plain old “oil.”

I’m afraid that in too many ways, we’re going down some pretty slippery slopes of government censoring our words and indeed our history. Today is it a flag. Tomorrow it is what we want to say, and…

No matter how much I hate the actions and justifications for the Civil War, it is past and it is history. The flags of the Confederacy mean little to me, especially since my family fought on the side of the Union as members of the 121st New York Infantry.

I look around and listen and see that many of us are letting our free speech be trampled upon by those who are “offended” by what I say or maybe what flag I fly or what picture I paint … and think the government should do something about it.

We veterans spent time defending the right of folks to say just about anything in just about any form they want. If someone wants to fly the flag of a failed cause, let them. If they want to paint a symbol of that cause on the roof of a car, so be it. I don’t have to agree with what it may have stood for, but I do have to respect their right to express themselves.

A few years ago, some folks in Valencia were all upset that a Vallarta market was going to occupy a space in the Old Orchard Shopping Center. They complained loudly to the city that it would have signs in Spanish and English. It could bring in the “wrong” kind of people and it wasn’t a fit in the neighborhood.

Guess what? The store has been there a number of years now, and it is doing just fine. I’ll bet most of the folks who complained now shop there.

In downtown Portsmouth, Va., there is a memorial statue that reads, “To Our Confederate Dead.”There is a move to have it removed, since it sits in the middle of the street. It turns out, it cannot come down for a number of reasons. Little things like state laws that say a monument or memorial cannot be removed. Also, that particular memorial is sitting on property not owned by the government, even if it is in the middle of a street. It will stay in place.

In many places in the South, there are graves of brothers who fought in the Civil War. One headstone may show that one brother was a Union soldier and the other a rebel. Do we tear down that memorial?

Should we rename our streets and cities, since some might find the names in Spanish to be offensive? Or maybe change the English names to Spanish?

My maternal grandparents were Danish. That makes me half Danish. Should I take offense that we have a high school mascot named the Vikings? My father had a stepfather who was a member of the Lakota Nation. Should the mascot of Hart High offend me?

Replica of the 1846 bear flag. Or is it a pig?

None of this was a real problem for a long time, and it shouldn’t be a problem now.

Free speech and expression are what make us Americans so wonderful. I might not like what you think or say, but I will defend your right to say it. At one time, as a member of the military, I would defend that right with my life, if need be.

I just don’t get it. We cannot start censoring words and symbols of history. We cannot do that to our words and symbols of today, either, or we will run the very great risk of destroying what took so long to build.

No, we don’t have any Confederate monuments of flags to concern us here in our part of the country, but we do have that pesky little bit of history about our California flag.

I know one thing for sure. That first flag had a bear on it that looked a lot like a pig. I find that offensive. Pigs deserve a better portrait.

Darryl Manzer grew up in the Pico Canyon oil town of Mentryville in the 1960s and attended Hart High School. After a career in the U.S. Navy he returned to live in the Santa Clarita Valley, where he serves as executive director of the SCV Historical Society. He can be reached at dmanzer@scvhistory.com. His older commentaries are archived atDManzer.com; his newer commentaries can be accessed [here]. Watch his walking tour of Mentryville [here].