The Last Flag Down In Sterlington

Seven years ago now there was that church shooting in South Carolina and the governor there rushed to get all Confederate flags off of and out of anyplace she could find them that she could get away with. I guess she figured that move would garner her some brownie points with the Republican Establishment. What she ended up doing was starting another round of South bashing by the leftist crowd that hates anything to do with our real history in the South. Those people are always looking for something to complain about or tear down. It’s what they live for. They have nothing to contribute to real life and so they destroy what others have.

Anyway, in this one instance the left-wingers pushed a little too hard and they ended up getting quite a bit of pushback from Southern Heritage folks around the country. Confederate flags started popping up all over the place. A lesson for the Southern Heritage folks here–when you get pushed–push back! There were flag rallies over in West Monroe (I’m talking about Northeast Louisiana here) and I started seeing pickup trucks in Monroe and in Sterlington with big Confederate flags flying on their back ends. Confederate flags started making their appearance on back roads from Monroe to Sterlington and on back roads in Sterlington, which was the small town about twelve miles north of Monroe where we lived.

My wife and I lived in Sterlington for almost 20 years, and we were content there. But in July of 2021 I got sick and ended up in the hospital, and from there to a nursing home. I never got back home again except for one day at Thanksgiving and for Christmas Day.

After the flag problems I mentioned earlier, a friend at church had made me a homemade flagpole, which another friend set up for me in our front yard. I started flying various Confederate flags on that pole–the Bonnie Blue and Polk’s Army of Tennessee Battle Flag among them. Back in 2019, my wife and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary. They gave us a big dinner at our church, and that day the camp commander of the SCV camp in Monroe gave me a nice First National Confederate flag. I put it up on our flagpole and it stayed there day and night for over two years.

It was sometime after I got to the nursing home last year that our landlord decided to sell the house we had lived in for almost 20 years and so my wife had to move out. A good friend at church helped her with that as I was incapacitated. At that point–the last Confederate flag in Sterlington came down. All those other Confederate flags in our area a few years earlier had been coming down, one by one, as people seemed to be losing interest in their Southern heritage–and some of them probably caved into leftist pressure–peer pressure and whatnot.

As far as I know now, we had the last Confederate flag that was up and flying in Sterlington–and now ours is down–through no choice of our own, but through necessity. My wife and I now live in a nursing home together in a nearby town, no longer in Sterlington. We had the last Confederate flag in that town that was still flying–and now it’s down. I doubt it will ever be replaced by anyone else because too many folks now believe Southern Heritage and culture to be “out of fashion.” More’s the pity!