A CALL TO ARMS TO DEFEND OUR HONOR AND FREEDOMS...

By Juan Montoya

This has been sticking in my craw for the better part of a week now following Wednesday's failed Trump-led insurrection to overturn the people's choice of a new freely-elected president and Congress.

To all of those of us who have served – and those who gave their lives – for the rights and freedoms we used to take for granted, watching thugs and defiant neo-confederates sauntering on the hallowed ground that so many died to preserve in freedom and waving the rebel flag, it had to be a bitter pill to swallow. It was for me, and it still is.

To the more than 360,000 Union dead who gave their lives to prevent that symbol of secession and rebellion from entering the halls and corridors of freedom while they were alive to defend it, this amounted to a thug wantonly stomping on their graves for some perverse sense of payback. It is a thing of cowards to trample on the graves of everyone who has served and died to preserve this symbol of our free nation, its very soul.

The Confederacy was whipped and soundly defeated and surrendered more than 150 years ago and die- hards like the man above – more like a feckless lemming – is still worshiping that aberrant deviancy, that dead-end detour of history, as if to turn back the pages and rewrite it to fit a perverse narrative that believes the South somehow turned up the victor. In a way, that is what Trump – the Inciter-in-Chief – was trying to achieve, to wrest a victory from ignominious defeat at the hands of a free people who voted him out.

To the man's right is a portrait of Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts senator who protested slavery. To his left is a portrait of John C. Calhoun, the seventh U.S. vice president, who was a staunch defender of slavery and heavily influenced the ideology that ultimately led to the South's secession.

The Confederate battle flag originated during the Civil War for the pro-slavery secessionists, but historians say its significance as a political symbol emerged in the 20th century as a sign of resistance to racial integration. During the entire Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, the flag never entered the U.S. Capitol. Until now.

It's time that we, the living, honor our battle dead by preserving the freedoms that they watered with their blood and tears. 

How else can we interpret the actions of our 45th president when he goaded the ignorant mob to riot and pillage in the people's house and willfully violated the oath of office he took to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" by inciting them to try to prevent the constitutionally mandated process of congressional acceptance of the states-certified electoral college votes other than sedition, a crime of the highest order?

Along the way, they killed a police man who tried to stop their rampage. He was Brian Sicknick, a 42-year-old military veteran who was bludgeoned with a fire extinguisher and died from his injuries after he collapsed at the Capitol. He was deployed to Saudi Arabia and Kyrgyzstan during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and was honorably discharged in 2003. As of Sunday, the family had not received a call of condolences from Trump.

The usurpers of our freedoms were running through the halls of Congress screaming that they had a right because "it is our house." Wrong. It is all of ours house, the house of all the people, not just theirs. And we will take it back and throw their rebel rag where it belongs, in the dustbin of history. We've done it before, and we'll do it again, so help us God.