The scariest costume I'll see all day

So I walk into the Red Cup just now for a breakfast burrito, and this guy comes in behind me in a Confederate uniform.

I think this is why I gave up doing Hallowe'en. Somewhere deep in my bones, I don't believe there is any such thing as a harmless fantasy. I remember an old dyke back in Oregon who told me once, "What you practice is what you get good at." Fantasy is a form of practice. (Or sometimes, it's a form a memory, but that's a different can of worms.) I don't think we completely create our own reality, but visualization is very powerful.

So I'm kinda procrastinating about finishing my breakfast and walking home. I'm kinda hoping this guy goes away before I do. Because I think it's best that I not have any opportunity to discuss his costume with him. Because from my point of view, there is nothing about the Confederacy that is quaint, comic, romantic, or worthy of emulation. If you think I'm joking, start reading the first autobiography of Frederick Douglass. And yes, the Civil War was about slavery. Lincoln may have started out with a willingness to continue to allow slavery if the union could be saved. By the time he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, that was all over. The Emancipation Proclamation was a matter of pragmatic war strategy. The Union absolutely depended on the armed service of free blacks and emancipated slaves in order to win the war.

And yet, in some ways the Civil War is still not over. The war between Blue and Gray is the historical beginning of the hostility between "blue states" and "red states." Slavery was once known as "the patriarchal institution," and in the 21st century, neo-Confederates do their best to defend the rule of the richest white men over everybody else. So the guy in that gray uniform is definitely the scariest thing I'll see all day--unless someone else has the bad taste to show up wearing a storm trooper costume with a swastika or a white sheet with a pointed hood.