Advanced Placement, once again proving why we nicknamed him such, went out the door on a delivery. In addition to the customer’s pizzas and cheesebread, he apparently grabbed another box — a large deep dish “crewpie”, which everyone had been eating slices of.

The customer was, as a person might expect, rather shocked and upset. And then he called the store, as was his right, to complain. And then he demanded that the pizza be remade.

The pizza that he didn’t order. The pizza that he didn’t pay for. The pizza that he now wanted, remade, for free.

Steve, running a bit ragged since he had to stay late (Greg had to leave early), and therefore not in his argumentative management mood, relented and remade the pizza.

The pizza that the guy didn’t order. The pizza that the guy didn’t pay for.

What a fuckin’ douche.

If there is one inalienable truth of war, the vast majority of those who go to fight and die, do so for sides that they haven’t chosen by ideological grounds, but rather, sides chosen for them due the geographical accidents of their birth. During the Second World War, children born in China, Japan, the United States, Britain, France, Germany and the Soviet Union volunteered or were conscripted into the militaries of the nations to which they were citizens of.

When the United States split in two during the 1860s, in the poorly named ‘Civil’ War, young Americans lined up to fight, not neccessarily because of any overriding ideological agreement beyond the propaganda they were fed, but because of more basic causes: defense of home, patriotic pride for state and country. They took up arms, and they marched, and they killed each other, and the south-east coast of the nation is littered with their battlefields and graveyards.

There are certain things I believe about the average Confederate infantryman. These are the same things I believe about the average infantryman from any country, ally or enemy — they were not neccessarily evil, they were not neccessarily bad people. They fought and died for their country, and deserve, if not to be honored by the country for which they died, to be respected, not for what they might have tried to accomplish, but for their willingess to sacrifice themselves on the altar offered them.

I believe that the Confederate soldiers who died in combat against soldiers of the United States deserve the respect of the country of whom they were once apart. At the same time, I don’t believe they, or any other soldiers who have died in combat against the United States, deserve the honors accorded to this nation’s honored dead. None of the foot troops, on either side, were responsible for the decisions which divided the country and brought it to war with itself.

With that out of the way …

… I used to post on a bulletin board which tended to attract a lot of libertarian and conservative posters. Often, the discussion would turn to the debate surrounding the display of the Confederate flag in the South. “Heritage or Hate?” Being a lefty, I don’t entirely buy the “Heritage” argument, but the problem with making the “hate” argument is that, invariably, the KKK gets dragged into the argument and someone mentions how the KKK always shows Confederate and US flags side by side — if the display of the Confederate flag at a KKK rally is enough to indict the flag as a symbol of racism, why isn’t the same true of the US flag?

Well, it seems like the KKK finally made a ruling — “Hate” it is. Wearing swastikas (shocker!), those who spoke at Antietam didn’t go to honor the Union soldiers who died there, but rather, their Confederate “brothers and sisters.”

I wonder, if those dead Confederate soldiers at Antietam had been born today, raised in this modern world, interacted with African-Americans in a setting where neither participants are second-class citizens, I wonder then how many of those Confederates would appreciate how the KKK has twisted their sacrifice into a screed for racial purity.

Driver’s License.
Towson University ID Card.
Giant Food Bonus Card.
Car Insurance Card.
Health Insurance Card.
My Debit Card.
$156, tips from yesterday and today — five twenties, two tens, the rest in fives and singles.
Three two-dollar bills folded between the driver’s license and my AAA membership card.
A business card.
A receipt from an ATM deposit.

Man, I really need to clean this thing out.