Remember that time South Carolina attacked Fort Sumter? That's the literal definition of treason. And I quote Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." Not exactly abstract legalese that requires a ton of parsing.
The states that seceded to become the Confederacy were actively engaged in open war against the United States government. A war they started because of the election of a man they deemed "hostile to slavery." A war they fought to maintain the "heaven ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race." A war they lost.
But it was a war based on a fundamental social conflict that is still not resolved and simmers under the zeitgeist, rearing its ugly head every so often to remind us it hasn't gone anywhere. It was not resolved in 1865, not in 1965, and sadly, not in 2015.
The "heritage" of the Confederacy, the enduring belief in Lost Cause romanticism, the invention and adoption of revisionist "traditions" and culture, has become society's Old Faithful: a cultural geyser that periodically lets off steam; a spectacle at which we ogle and wax poetic about the fragility of our condition. But one day it'll explode and it'll be a catastrophe from which we might not recover.
The tragedy of America is that this is all self-inflicted. This trajectory to self-destruction doesn't have to be the outcome. As Jon Stewart so eloquently pointed out, "Al Qaeda... ISIS... they're not shit on the damage we can apparently do to ourselves on a regular basis."
The troglodyte that killed those people in South Carolina wanted to fire the opening shots in a new race war. He is a Confederate in every sense of the word. He is a white supremacist. He is a terrorist. He is a traitor.
The worst part is that he is not some aberration. Oh, we want to comfort and assure ourselves that he is, that he has some mental issue, or that he's evil, or some other easy excuse that absolves us all of responsibility.
His actions were heinous, but he is the product of a media environment and culture that protects the ignorant and glorifies division. This is the "heritage" celebrated by those who fly the Confederate flag. By those like my neighbor.
And what about my neighbor? In a perfect world, I would ring his doorbell and have a reasonable discussion with him about how what he's doing is offensive and ahistoric and I'd love to correct his understanding of the entire mess. But the sad fact is, he's not alone, either.
In my time here I've seen scores of Confederate bumper stickers, license plates, and even other flags. Neo-Confederate revisionism is everywhere. It's not confined to "dumb rednecks" or red-state voters or Nascar fans or any other easy stereotype we use to deceive ourselves and dismiss painful realities. It's not even confined to older generations. The killer in South Carolina is 21. He's a Millennial. He's one of us.
And every day that we don't react to that information, every day we don't internalize this conflict, every day we tell ourselves nothing is wrong, every day we claim we can't be racist because we have black friends, every day we share some viral cat video instead of watch the news, every day we don't knock on our neighbor's door... is another day nothing will change.
