Confederate flag no longer blowing in the wind

For many of those who grew up outside the South, the rebel flag has never had much appeal, let alone the rebel yell.

Now it is gone with the wind, and for some the film never had much appeal either. Now we don't give a damn.

With heavy security watching, the flag came down Friday morning, the New York Times reported. The South Carolina legislature acted relatively quickly to bring it down after the murders at the Charleston Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17.

It has been written in many places that although the Confederacy lost the Civil War, it won the cultural wars that followed.

No more. The tipping point was the murder of nine Christians in a Charleston, S.C., church. They were at a prayer meeting in the so-called “Bible Belt.”

Flags were important during the war, and were important to the killer.

Online activists found Internet website evidence of a racist manifesto put forth by Dylann Roof.

It included him waving the Confederate flag and Nazi symbols and burning an American flag. 

Fifteen years ago, when he was governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura refused to return to Virginia a battle flag captured by a regiment from his state.

He put it in wrestler’s language, very succinctly, when asked to return it at a national governor’s meeting. “Absolutely not. Why, I mean, we won.” And it was taken at Gettysburg.

Even now it appears that there is a wide swath in the former Confederacy that does not understand it lost the war that freed the slaves.

It was fought over slaves, not states’ rights.  A PBS broadcast still spreads the lie.

If it is going to be claimed that it was fought over states’ rights then it must be recognized that northern states demanded the right to free slaves who reached their territory, guided by the North Star, as told in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 meant that anyone who housed escaping slaves could be jailed

Jack Bass, an emeritus professor of social sciences and humanities at the College of Charleston, told the Times: “This is a high moment for South Carolina. It’s significant. It could be a turning point.”

That remains to be seen, but it is true the war began with a rebel attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. Or will it just be another day?