Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

Capture the flag

Dylann Roof's hatred and murder was nurtured in a state of intolerance. South Carolina needs to take down the Confederate flag..or we must take it down ourselves.

When Dylann Storm Roof drove toward Charleston's historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church last night, he did so with the .45 that his dad so thoughtfully bought him for his 21st birthday, with at least 10 bullets, with a hatred that surpasses all understanding in his heart, and a "Confederate States of America" placard on the front of his Korean-made car.

His odyssey will live in infamy, provoking unbelievable sorrow...and a necessary form of rage.

Unbelievable sorrow for the loss of nine souls in last night's Charleston massacre. They are not symbols of a too-often violent and racist culture. They are wives and husbands, brothers and sisters, daughters and sons. #SayTheirNames and never forget them...including recent college grad Tywanza Sanders, librarian Cynthia Hurd, high school track coach Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a state senator.  The fact that these people were killed by a man who pretended to pray alongside them for nearly an hour, who was calculating enough to leave behind a witness to tell of their pain and suffering, is twisted beyond comprehension.

Or is it? It must have been hard to process mass killings back, say, in 1966, when sniper Charles Whitman climbed the University of Texas bell tower...before Columbine, before Aurora, before Newtown. Today, Mass Murder American Style comes with its own tired rituals and its own warped linguistics -- and occasionally a plot twist. In this case, the sordid racism of the American South. Roof's rampage is an American nightmare -- the dark place  where the 16th Street Baptist Church meets Sandy Hook, where the KKK gets admitted to Virginia Tech.

Mass murderers are a product of nature...and nurture. We don't know exactly what was in Roof's mind, but we can see the roots of his twisted mindset rooted in his man-made environment. When he reportedly told his victims that "[y]ou rape our women and you're taking over our country" -- he was echoing more than 150 years of lynch-mob culture, laced with the AM radio waves of "I want my country back." When he screwed the Confederate flag onto the front of his car, he was brandishing a powerful symbol of racism, apartheid and oppression, one that is embraced, officially, by the government of his own state.

In a weird synergy, news of the Charleston massacre spread just as the U.S. Supreme Court was ruling that the state of Texas can block citizens from putting the Confederate flag on their vanity license plates. Here, the court ruled, the holder of the free speech rights is not the citizen but the government that prints the license plates. In South Carolina, the government uses its free speech rights to spit in the face of its African-American citizens, its history and now the victims of Dylann Roof's hatred, by waving the Confederate flag on the grounds of its state capitol.

"We all woke up today and the heart and soul of South Carolina was broken," an emotional South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said this morning, before returning to her office under the shadow of that blood-splattered Confederate flag still flying high. We all share Haley's grief, but decent Americans should not allow sorrow to repress our righteous anger, either. The victims and their loved ones are truly in our thoughts and prayers, but mere thoughts and prayers aren't more powerful than an intolerant society, That requires action.

If Nikki Haley wants to repair South Carolina's broken soul, she needs to take down the emblem of Dylann Roof's hatred from its perch of power in Columbia, and she needs to take it down tonight. And if she won't, people of conscience need to capture the Confederate flag -- remove it, shred it, burn it and bury it -- by any means necessary. To live in its shadow of bigotry is to live in silence, and the silence is already deafening.