I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say what NewsChannel5 would not: that there’s a little more to this story than meets the eye:
According to White County Police, John Lewis has had an ongoing dispute with his neighbor. On Monday, Lewis used a Bobcat to destroy part of his neighbor’s house on Daniel Drive.
The family that lives in the home said they have had ongoing disputes with Lewis for years, but don’t know what provoked this latest incident.
“He tried to kill my family and kids for no reason,” said Eric Mayfield, “It will take forever to come back from this.”
Lewis rammed the home multiple times, and two sides of the house are badly damaged. Family members spent the day picking up the rubble, and said luckily, the children who were home at the time of the incident were not hurt.
John Lewis is black. In the video at the link you can see a giant Confederate flag fluttering from the wreckage of Eric Mayfield’s front porch. I’m thinking that might have something to do with the bad blood between these two neighbors that ultimately resulted in Lewis taking a Bobcat to his neighbors’ house. By the way, obviously I’m not condoning Lewis’ actions in any way. I’m just curious why no one is stating the obvious here.
No one is pointing out the obvious because then all the Confederate flag waving losers here in Dog’s Failed Confederate Paradise for White People Only would be required to accept some tiny iota of responsibility, and we can’t be having that because jeebus would strangle a kitten, as you well know.
I’d have to disagree. I dislike the Stars and Bars as much as the next white liberal, but there’s going to have to be something a helluva lot more compelling and inciting than hanging a Confederate flag on your own property to require the other family to accept any kind of “responsibility” for Mr. Lewis’ actions.
I would not expect Mr. Lewis to be excused of consequences for his behavior. But why not report the story in the language that will be heard around the water cooler? “Mr. Lewis, a black man, finally lost his shit and rammed his bigoted white neighbors home with his Bobcat.”
But I think flying the Confederate flag is an inflammatory act no doubt meant to provoke the neighbor with whom this family had long-running disputes. I didn’t mean to imply that the flag alone was sufficient to drive John Lewis to do what he did — who knows, we don’t have a lot of info to go on. But if I were to guess I’d say the flag has been flying there as a giant “fuck you” to their black neighbor for years, just one symbol of the wide gulf between these two.
Feel free to disagree. I am basing my opinions on my personal life experience and make no claim on global generality. I live here in the Failed Confederacy; I was born here. I would love to be wrong and find that Mr. Mayfield is actually a certified historian of the era, sensitive to the racist history of the Failed Confederacy, a dedicated Civil War re-enactor who invariably plays the part of a Union infantryman freeing the slaves, and only flies the Stars and Bars to publicly affirm his love of mint juleps; I would love to find that Mr. Lewis is a rabid supporter of Herman Cain who has neglected his meds and has a long history of senseless violence involving heavy equipment. But, that seems unlikely to me.
From my own personal experience I would guess that Mr. Mayfield is a racist dick who misses no opportunity to heckle his black neighbor. Not that I’m excusing Mr. Lewis’s actions, but I’d also guess, based again on personal experience, that Mr. Lewis got no help from the local PD.
Had this happened in Florida, of course, Mr. Mayfield could have gunned down Mr. Lewis with impunity, and community standards would have been upheld. There are days I despair of my fellow human beings, but Steven Pinker tells me that violence is declining, historically speaking.
While I concede that flying a Confederate flag is intended to send a provocative message, so is burning the American flag as a form of protest. However, neither one is so inflammatory (pun intended) as to justify violence against the messenger. Particularly violence that includes heavy equipment and trespassing on someone else’s personal property.
My heart feels for Mr. Lewis. My brain tells me that his own behavior has turned him from potentially sympathetic victim into violent criminal.
I had no idea bobcats could be trained to attack. I didn’t even know they were domesticated. And it’s really amazing that they could destroy a house, aren’t they like 70lbs max?
GROAN
Whoops, I guess they’re only about 40lbs max. The whole thing seemed so much more funny when I imagined an animal going crazy on the guy’s house.
I noticed that the flag only showed up for about three seconds and with all the other outside shots of the damaged house somehow they managed to avoid that angle.
Hmmm… it does make one wonder, doesn’t it? But let us look at the bright side– at least no one broke out the firearms.
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What’s wrong with these people? Wouldn’t it be better to have a beer in the back yard?
SB,
Why don’t we all wait and see what the investigation discovers? Certainly the neighbor may have been a racist and a dreadful neighbor. But to assume that the neighbor with the Bobcat is somehow the victim before more facts are known is a sort of racism. It is as likely that the cause will prove to be over a property line of other ordinary dispute.
Flying the Confederate flag may demonstrate stupid opinions or a dubious view of American history but it isn’t a provocation for violence. I remember that lesson from the Vietnam War when flag burning and cheering for the enemy were important examples of free speech and from the ‘Piss Christ’ debate where urine-soaked crucifixes were protected artistic expression that Christians were expected to fund.
Oh I’m not assuming anything of the sort. You don’t take a Bobcat to a house full of small children and get to play the victim card. Obviously there was a lot of bad blood between these two families going back a long time. But as I said earlier, flying a Confederate flag at your black neighbor is a giant FUCK YOU. It’s incendiary, to say the least. And on that news video we have a white guy standing at his fridge saying this all happend for “NO REASON WHATSOEVER!” and I’m calling bullshit on that, big time.
“While I concede that flying a Confederate flag is intended to send a provocative message, so is burning the American flag as a form of protest.”
It’s only 8:18 CDT, and already my eyeballs have stumbled across a gratuitously ludicrous and disingenuous argument.
If my neighbor burned a U.S. flag in her front yard, I’d recommend that she find a somewhat less hazardous way to register her public protest against the government. If my neighbor decided to hang a huge Confederate flag from her front porch, then I’d find it hard to fathom exactly what she was protesting, except perhaps the presence of an emancipated Negro living shamelessly next door and legally married to a white woman and miscegenating the block. (Also, I might actually find common cause with my neighbor’s complaint from the former example, and even if I found her method of expression offensive, I wouldn’t find it personally threatening. However, the open display of a patently racist symbol does not often occur in a vacuum, which I believe is SB’s point.)
In other words, given the respective histories of both symbols, a comparison between apples and oranges would find more commonality.
Also, I’m trying to remember the last time an American flag was burned here in the U.S. and it wasn’t a drunken frat boy prank? It was an actual form of protest? Can’t think of it. But here in the South the stars-and-bars are all-too common, on pickup trucks and yes, flying from peoples’ front porches.
Not that I’d waste my time checking but I’m guessing that Stormfront and the other Neonazi blogs are salivating over the red meat…
I suspect this story has been overshadowed by George Zimmerman’s murder of Trayvan Martin. Saw screen shots of “Good shot Zimmy” comments at Fox Nation.
Assholes.
Sam,
My initial point was that until there is an investigation of the facts in the case, there is no point in speculating on what the cause of Mr. Lewis’ action was.
Also I note that the children were in the home. Perhaps the children were racists too so they deserved to be homeless.
It seems as if some of the comments here want to the cause to be racist behavior because the presence of the Confederate flag proves that the neighbor was a racist bigot who somehow deserved a violent response.
If that is true, then Mr. Lewis has a good argument for mitigation of any criminal penalties although I suspect he will not be able to escape making compensation for the actual damage.
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