I was taught same as most South Carolinians that to be southern was to be patriotic, TWICE, that outsiders had no business telling us how to interpret our own history and if they didn't like the Stars and Bars, screw 'em.
The problem is, even by South Carolinian standards, to adore the Confederate battle flag was to spit on the history of many of our fellow citizens and to lie to ourselves that we actually knew our own history at all.
Even when we woke up that the flag was deeply offensive to many of our friends and colleagues, we just smiled and went on and resisted changing. Because we were taught to be stubborn.
But we knew. We knew we were perpetuating a little wrong, because the power to do great deeds, good or bad, the things our 'legendary' ancestors dreamed of doing, was lost in the ashes. Lost with the end of slavery and the wealth that owning the ancestors of many of our friends stole from their backs and their blood.
We knew we were hiding from the shame with our silent nodding smiles whenever someone complained. Or someone else made a loud brash statement that the Confederate flag was just so awesome...and we refused to object in any way.
Then a loser with a gun up and killed nine people in the act of prayer in a church last Wednesday. He did it, we soon learned, in the name of that damn flag.
At that point, far more people in South Carolina than not realized that our smiling silence killed them as surely as Dylann Roof had. Someone, at least one of us, should have told him, dude. No. Just... stop. People saw the signs. People had all the time in the world to dial him back a notch.
But no one did. People like his roommate just smiled in silence and let him rant on about who he was going to kill and how he was going to do it.
I can't make it any clearer. But this is why that damn flag is coming down everywhere.
We all know our small silent part, not just in last week's tragedy but in decades of excusing away the pain and loss of our fellow Southerners whose ancestors did more than ours did to build the South in the first place, and then to rebuild it anew and now, in the New South, have more than earned the portion of dignity owed every American.
For these reasons, I think this change is heartfelt, and real, and lasting, not just for one bad event but for this change of heart being one century overdue, at least."