Stardate 20020212.1803

(On Screen): All activist groups eventually become irrelevant. Either they win, or their cause ceases to matter. The one thing you can be sure of is that they won't voluntarily disband; you'll never see one of them say, "War's over; we won, so let's all go home." Sometimes when their old cause is won, they find a new cause: the March of Dimes once was concerned with Polio, but once Polio was licked by an effective vaccine, it switched to birth defects.

But some activist groups really can't change their charter. A good way to tell that they have outlived their time is when they start to pick small fights. Which seems to be what is happening now with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons (NAACP). Once it was one of the premiere groups which concerned itself with such things as apartheid, and discrimination in hiring and housing, and things like that.

Now they're concerned with the fact that the State of South Carolina still displays the Stars-and-Bars (Confederate flag) on its statehouse. While that flag has sometimes been a symbol for racism, it just doesn't seem to me to be to be a cause worth the kind of action that the NAACP is taking now, which is to say organized protests and attempts at boycott.

If this is all the NAACP can find to get upset about, then things really have gotten a lot better.