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At Twilight's Last Gleaming
Its effective beginning came on January 9, 1861, in Charleston, South Carolina, when a rebel artillery battery fired on the federal garrison at Ft. Sumter. The beginning of its end may have come in a volley of bullets fired by a 21-year-old white supremacist in a Charleston church on June 17, 2015, killing nine African-Americans engaged with their pastor in that subversive activity known as bible study.
The War Between the States had its roots in 150 years of indentured servitude of African people brought against their will to this country as chattel. The bombardment of Ft. Sumter was the first overt act against a federal government's intent to end slavery in America.
That war, though ended officially at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, with Lee's surrender to Grant, went on in other guises for another century and goes on still. It was going on that June night when a white guy was warmly welcomed into a circle of devout African-Americans only to shoot them dead because they represented to him all that was wrong with America.
The alleged shooter had wrapped his ambitions in the Confederate flag -- that prized symbol of ignominious failure so cherished by many as a sign, not of defeat, but of rebellion against a future in which persons would be judged, as blessed Martin said, not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Now the governor and majorities in both houses of South Carolina's legislature -- a state that once indulged in nullification and secession while leading the charge against Lincoln's resolve to preserve the Union -- have bowed to the onrush of history.
Down from the state capitol grounds will come the Confederate flag -- the symbol of an entity that has not existed outside prejudiced minds for 150 years -- and sent on its way to a museum where it belongs.
Of course, we will continue to see the Stars and Bars pasted on bumpers and otherwise displayed on private property, where it will represent the alienation, resentment and a certain kind of nihilism uniquely American in nature. To such people, it seems that freedom means being as loutish and contrary as they want, almost daring others to challenge their behavior.
Often their preference is for the the kind of climate in which the plain English of the Second Amendment that calls for a well-regulated militia to be prepared to bear arms is dismissed in favor of the constitutional fiction that no one should be denied ownership and the open carrying of a firearm.
The congregation of Charleston's Emanuel A.M.E. Church is tragically familiar with that point of view.
Meanwhile, the accused killer of the Emanuel Church nine made himself an enforcer of what he believed to be the message conveyed by the Confederate flag:
+ Black people and their lives mean less than white people and their lives.
+ Persons with black skins are not deserving of ordinary American rights, such as voting.
+ America is a white man's nation.
+ And borrowing from the Gadsden flag recently adopted as the standard of the Tea Party, "Don't tread on us."
Most snakes don't issue such a warning, and those that do are still reptilian.
Flags and standards of all sorts at one time or another become something more or less than they were meant to be in their inception. The cross, for instance. A crucifix is the more appropriate presentation of the cross because it is a symbol of a martyr's death. It is not a symbol of victory, but no one in the Christian realm has yet to figure out how to make a wearable emblem of an empty grave.
The Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould wrote of "the cross of Jesus going on before," but he wrote that hymn for a simple Sunday school procession. Perhaps, though, he had in mind the crosses that processed before the crusaders a millennium earlier.
The dread banner of Nazi Germany -- blood-red embossed with a huge black swastika -- gathered a whole people to it for the sake of ridding the world of Jews and other allegedly lesser beings.
The Confederate flag is a relic of a terrible time in the history of the human race and of this country. Its consignment to the back room of history should help us remember that time, and just as Yom HaShoah (the Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day) helps us vow "never again," a similar vow should be given with similar determination to honor the memory of our African-American sisters and brothers who were dehumanized under the Stars and Bars with multitudes driven to their deaths.
Many of their descendants are trying still to recover from the inaptly named "Reconstruction" and the era of Jim Crow that did not see the beginning of its end until Mrs. Parks sat down.
May the twilight's last gleaming of this day be the last light ever to shine upon the Confederate flag other than that in an illuminated museum case. May he who dares fly the Nazi flag, or any other symbol of human degradation, dwell in his own darkness. May his dreams be nightmares in which he sees himself put upon by the same forces he in waking hours longed to join, and thereby learn a lesson about the crucial need to respect the dignity of every human being.
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