There Will Be No Confederate Lives Matter Veterans Day Parade In Washington Tomorrow

I saw that which you see here on Sunday, in the Skagit Valley Herald, but forgot about it til now, the day before Veterans Day, which is a good time to remember.

This particular item sort of fits my ongoing theme of things I see via west coast news sources online which I likely would not ever see in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, or most other Texas newspapers.

This past Saturday my old hometown of Burlington had its annual Veterans Day Parade. In the rain. For the first time a Native American was the parades's Grand Marshall, he being a Swinomish Tribe veteran of the Vietnam War named Chester J. Cayou.

One might see a normal Veterans Day Parade in Fort Worth, or other Texas towns. But it would be difficult to have a local Native American Veteran as Grand Marshall, due to the fact that long ago Texans ran most of the Native American population out of Texas, those that they did not kill. Only two or three very small reservations exist in Texas.

None in Tarrant County.

My old home county, Skagit, in Washington, has multiple tribes with multiple reservations. The aforementioned Swinomish, along with the Skagit and the Samish. Two of the Skagit County tribes own HUGE casino resort complexes, those being the Swinomish and the Skagit.

Meanwhile in Texas one of the few remaining tribes has recently gotten feisty about its plan to build a casino resort of the sort tribes have built in other states.

Also, meanwhile in Texas, I learned a few minutes ago via the highly esteemed Bud Kennedy, on Facebook, that tomorrow Fort Worth and a couple other towns in the vicinity are going to be having themselves very special Veterans Day Parades of the sort one would not see in my old home zone. Or the rest of modern, civilized America.

First the announcement graphic and then a couple comments to the Facebook post which will show you there are some sane voices in Texas, even though they may not be in the majority most of the time....

Oh my, this is just embarrassing for so many reasons. I really do not see this attracting very many people, either to be in these parades, or to watch them.

And now the reasonable pair of comments regarding the Confederate Lives Still Matter Veterans Day Parades...

I'm descended from Confederate veterans who opposed slavery and secession but served anyway. It's not at all clear to me that they'd want to be remembered for that part of their lives. Maybe, I suppose. But they'd surely not want their service *emphasized* over that of veterans from other wars. That aspect of this smells of malice to me.

And this one...

Those who fought for the Confederacy, including several of my ancestors, were traitors to their country and their Constitution. American soldiers swear an oath to defend the Constitution not destroy it.

See what I mean? Definitely not all Texans are embarrassing nutjobs. In other words, Ted Cruz is definitely not the Texan norm. More on Texan nutjobs in a following blog post....