This past week has seen one of the most remarkable events in recent history take place in the beautiful city of Charleston, South Carolina. I'm not talking about the horrific murder that took place in a historic black church there by a disturbed young man with a very apparent racist motivation.
I am talking about the incredible response by the most deeply affected in the community -- the families and fellow parishioners of the victims of the killings. Their reaction, heartfelt and clear, was a Christian message of forgiveness for the killer and a desire to accept what had happened without hate, without desire for revenge and with love for one's fellow man. I wanted to cry as I heard their words; I wanted to be a part of what they have. Good, good people.
In the couple days afterwards, the media took pains to point out things they don't understand -- one going so far as to ask whether the Confederate flag, which also is flown in South Carolina, would also be brought down to half-staff along with the State and US flags.
Really? That's what you're concerned about? The story is quite obviously the incredible goodness of the people in that church, their Christian charity and forgiveness -- that they were so good to this stranger sitting in their Bible study that, as he told the survivors, he almost didn't go through with his killing spree because the people were so nice to him. But no, let's dwell on a symbol and try to make something of that.
I'll tell you what I took out of the press's stupid fascination with the Confederate flag. I think it is time for us to demystify the message of some of those symbols and immediately defuse whatever negative impact they have. So many black people get upset at the sight of that flag or, worse, a white robe and hood. Jews recoil at the sight of a swastika. You get the idea.
But as long as they are going to act that way, the ghosts of the Nazis of the '30s and '40s continue to win. The spirits of the KKK celebrate their hold on the frightened. The symbols retain their strength as long as the people affected by them continue to allow themselves to be affected.
And the solution is quite simple. Do not remove the symbol from our consciousness; rather, change its meaning and its impact by adopting it and completely diluting the negativity in its meaning.
What if, in the next five years, black Americans started to fly the Confederate flag as a symbol of, say, their success in rising from slavery over 150 years, or racial pride, or whatever? Make patches from it and wear them. Have "white robe" parties and dances to show that they are perfectly capable of rising above the hatreds of the past. Seize the initiative and the symbol so that it means something different -- or, ultimately, nothing at all.
Can you imagine if Jewish Americans, or gays, started wearing swastikas as jewelry, widely enough that it would lose all symbolism and crush the hatred that spawned its past use? OK, so I have a hard time seeing that, but much stranger fads have gotten popular very quickly. Maybe because it is so hard to accept, it would be news quickly, be accepted that much faster and, most importantly, have the quickest impact in completely defusing its effect ... and removing its capacity to cause fear.
I don't happen to belong to a group for which there is such a fearful but equally anachronistic symbol -- not even the NBA logo (all those tall people really do frighten me, but I can easily shut off the TV). So I really can't tell you how hard it might be for a member of those groups to don the symbol that causes them the most distress, in the spirit of killing its capacity to instill fear forever.
But think of it this way -- absent the Internet, absent email and tweeting and Facebook, it took decades for these symbols to achieve the capacity they now have to represent what they do. We have all those media elements today. By 2020 the flag, the robe, the swastika could be so widely seen as the symbols of those who once feared them -- or of no one at all -- that it would have made our collective heads spin.
Perhaps the good-hearted people of Charleston and the Emanuel A.M.E. Church can start by raising the Confederate flag and declaring it to be the symbol of their love for each other and their fellow man, and that it shall be so forever. I would jump in my car and drive there to march right along with them in Christian love and peace.
And those ghosts can just dry up and blow away. Poof.
Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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