Tom Fiedler: Enough silliness! Stop seeking divisions that don't exist

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s a native New Englander growing up amid stories of Paul Revere and Old Concord Bridge, I was taken aback last week to learn about a controversy stirring at an elementary school in Longwood, a comfortable Orlando suburb, that ignited when the students chose a Minuteman as the school symbol.

We're not talking about a missile system; this was your standard Minuteman, a fellow posed wearing a tricornered hat, a bandolier and carrying a musket. Had the opposition to the symbol come from a local contingent of Brits, I could empathize, though not sympathize; they blew their chance.

Rather, the group raising the fuss over having a Minuteman as the mascot were parents (I shudder to use the label ``liberals'') who felt that the connotation had changed of late to mean someone in one of these psycho militia groups, the kind who wear camouflage clothes and war paint, then run about in the forests on weekends training to resist oppressive Uncle Sam.

I might have let this pass unnoted except that it comes as part of a chain of similar controversies generating similarly silly reactions.

One of those is the flap in Tallahassee over publicly displaying the flag that flew over the Florida state capitol between 1863 and 1865. Some members of the Legislature's black caucus and a chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Council called a press conference earlier this month to declare that the flag was offensive to black Floridians and demand its removal.

This, of course, was the flag that flew during the years when the state was part of the Confederacy (although it is not the more familiar Stars-and-Bars standard that Rebel troops carried in battle).

One could understand the offense if, for no reason in particular, state officials decided to start hoisting the Confederate flag as if honoring all that it stood for. But in this case, the protest caught most people in the Capitol unawares because it was simply among five flags that have been displayed in the Capitol's lobby for nearly 20 years.

Each flag represents a ``sovereign'' government to which, at some point in the state's history, Floridians paid allegiance. There it stands, alongside the flags of Spain, Britain, France and Mexico, as ordered by the Florida Cabinet in the mid-1970s, when Reubin Askew, hardly a redneck, was governor.

A third controversy flashed nearby as the Florida House of Representatives, as it does almost every year, debated whether to let high school students participate in a nonsectarian prayer (presumably beginning, ``To whom it may concern . . . '') at noncompulsory school ceremonies, like graduation.

Several members rose in protest about the trauma that could be suffered by those students who came from homes in which a different prayer might be offered, if any prayer at all. Great arguments soared again about the separation of church and state, about the tyranny of the majority, and so on.

Please. Is there so little of importance to be done in that Longwood elementary school, in the state Capitol or in the Legislature that we devote considerable energy to debating such silliness?

There is commonality among these three examples that I would lump together in a single category called ``faux victimization.'' My meaning: Participants are finding victims where none exist.

Let me be clear. I understand the importance of sensitivity to the feelings of others and I strive to achieve that.

Yet in each of these three incidents -- and I'm sure others are conveniently available -- nobody's feelings were likely to be hurt in the least.

I could understand, for example, that if in the midst of the standoff now going on in Montana between the FBI and the Montana Freemen somebody proposed naming a school after the latter, some parents would be rightly offended. But the Minutemen? Be serious.

If any child is apt to be confused by what that role model exemplifies, it would be a perfect opportunity to explain the difference between the real patriots of 1776 and the wacko ``patriots'' of 1996.

I am mindful, too, of the sensitivity of many Americans to flying the Confederate flag. Those who swore allegiance to it did so mostly to uphold the abhorrent practice of slavery.

There can be little doubt that when people today gratuitously slap Confederate flag bumper strips on their pick-up trucks, or fly the flag alongside the U.S. flag in their yards, they are deliberately and stupidly insulting many blacks.

But that wasn't the case in the Capitol, where the state flag of 1863 was in its proper historical context. As Secretary of State Sandra Mortham said, the flag is a part of Florida's history, although it's not a chapter in which Floridians should take great pride.

As for the student-led, voluntary, nonsectarian ``prayer,'' by the time you hang all those qualifiers on it, one wonders how on God's green Earth . . . whoops . . . how in the world anyone can take offense. By the time it's delivered, the ``prayer'' is likely to be about as proselytizing as a Chinese cookie's fortune.

High school teenagers are not easily traumatized, by denuded prayer or anything else. These are the same kids who can drive cars, are legally allowed to see R-rated movies and can get condoms in school. (The thought of such things drives me to prayer.)

There is enough in this country and the world that drives us apart that we don't need people who see it as their mission to find divisions that don't exist.

Far better it would be for us to find those goals on which we can all agree -- like true patriotism, like true racial and religious tolerance -- and spend our energies striving to make them reality.