Letters to the Editor/<br>  Free Press Forum

As an American and a person passionately against racism, I say it is wrong for the battle flag of the Confederacy to be flown over the South Carolina statehouse building or any other. I am proud to agree with the 50,000 people who demonstrated on Martin Luther King Day demanding its removal. It is abominable that vestiges of it are in Georgia, Mississippi and other Southern state flags.

At the heart of this matter is what I am grateful to have learned from Aesthetic Realism, founded by America’s great poet and historian Eli Siegel, about the fight in every human being – in me – between respect for the world and contempt for it. “The deepest desire of every person,” Mr. Siegel explained, “is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis.” This desire is the source of art, kindness, truth, good sense in life and economics. He also explained the ugliest thing in people, causing every injustice, from a sarcastic insult, a “little lie,” to the deadly forms of crime, racism, war. It is contempt, “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.”