Dear American South: Lower your Confederate flags, but raise your people

A couple of memories have been bouncing around my brain the last 24 hours. The first is a favorite song from the late '60s/early '70s -- "The Night They Drove Olf Dixie Down," written and recorded by The Band, later a Top 40 hit for Joan Baez.  Indeed, it was hard to get that tune out of your head on a night you never thought you'd see in your lifetime, with Confederate flags falling like so many dominoes.

It was just last Thursday that I wrote a piece called "Capture the Flag" and became part of a virtual choir of dozens and then hundreds and then finally thousands of voices urging South Carolina to yank down the Confederate flag that inspired a racist mass murderer. But few expected the hardened hearts of the Dixie establishment to actually listen.

What's happened since Gov. Nikki Haley declared at 4 p.m. yesterday that she wants lawmakers to vote to remove the flag from the state capitol grounds has been remarkable. Not only did Haley's plea get instant support from the state's GOP U.S. senators and most key state lawmakers, but in short order the most powerful legislative leader in Mississippi -- once the dark heart of racial oppression -- called for removing the Stars and Bars from its state flag, Virginia's governor blocked the Confederate emblem from license plates, and Wal-Mart, eBay and Amazon stopped selling Confederate paraphernalia.

Indeed, it all reminded me of something remarkable that happened a quarter-century ago: The collapse of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Iron Curtain. For my generation of Cold War kids, it seemed a sad foregone conclusion that the yoke of Soviet domination would never be lifted from Eastern Europe, but when it was, it all happened in a matter of a just a few weeks. Every day, there was a shocking new headline about liberation -- in Poland, or East Berlin, or Czechoslovakia. The hard foundation of Communism behind that wall had been just one wobbly Jenga the whole time.

Last night almost felt the same. The psychic barrier of the Confederate flag -- and the tragic culture of oppression that it stood for - had hovered over the American South for my entire lifetime, even longer than the Berlin Wall had stood, and now here it was collapsing faster than a proverbial house of cards, with a new earthquake every few minutes.

Yup, it felt just like the Berlin Wall...except that it wasn't. Indeed, imagine the joyous scenes we saw from November 1989 -- people from East and West, frolicking atop the massive wall, ripping out chunks as souvenirs, except that a repressive regime in East Germany wasn't yielding anything else. The Berlin Wall was a symbol of a harsh system, and it fell because that entire system collapsed. In South Carolina and its neighboring states, furling the Stars and Bars was a defensive move by a backwards yet still-empowered system, one that still denies health care, equal education, and other civil rights to its citizens.

Don't get me wrong -- I think it will be fantastic if a relic of racial discrimination is taken down in Mississippi and elsewhere, and if the statues honoring Confederate leaders like Jefferson Davis are toppled just like statues of Lenin and Stalin were knocked over and smashed in 1989. But is that really going to be the only focus here? I'm thinking about pieces like one I read this morning on the iconoclastic website The Intercept, listing outdated tributes to the old Southern way of life that need to go.

By all means, change the name of Calhoun Street where the nine Charleston victims were gunned down last week. But wouldn't it be a much better tribute to the victims and their loved ones for South Carolina to join the 21st Century and no longer remain one of the last five states in the nation to not have a law against hate crimes on the books, where there's no additional sanctions against a terrorist like Dylann Roof who wanted to start a race war, or against someone who attacks a member of the LGBT community merely because of how they choose to live and whom they choose to love.

OK, you can also pull down the statue of that same slavery defender, John Calhoun, that sits a block from the church where the massacre occurred, sure. But what about pulling down and smashing into a thousand pieces a statute -- the reactionary voter ID law that was signed into law by Gov. Haley in 2011. That backwards measure was just one of a series of laws in GOP-led states aimed at making it a lot harder for folks, but especially African-Americans and Latinos, to lawfully cast ballots, a half century after Selma.

Yes, it's cool that a nearby state moved so swiftly to halt Confederate-fueled license plates, but shouldn't we be a little more worried about the 200,000 people in South Carolina who aren't getting health care -- some of whom will get unnecessarily sick and some of whom will die -- because the Palmetto State, like its neighbors, won't expand Medicaid under a program that happens to bear the name of the first black president. (In fact, South Carolina lawmakers have even been debating a broader bill that would in effect nullify all of "Obamacare" in the state.)

It's true that furling South Carolina's Confederate flag on the state capitol grounds and putting it in a museum won't bring back any of the dead. But you know what would save lives in the Palmetto State?...rolling back some of the nation's most permissive gun laws (it recently received an 'F' from The Law Center To Prevent Gun Violence) such as not requiring background checks for private gun sales.

And while I'm picking on South Carolina because it's been the epicenter of the recent controversy, that state is not an island. It is one of a wide swath of jurisdictions across the southern and central portions of the United States -- a kind of a modern-day confedera...tion -- that honor the spirit of the Stars and Bars not only by incorporating its imagery, but through 21st Century laws and policies that make life more perilous for many but especially for people of color.

The flag that first safeguarded slavery has been revived and resurrected to crush Reconstruction, to defend segregation, and now defend a new "way of life" that venerates mass incarceration, brutality by militarized police, a rollback of the Voting Rights Act, and separate and unequal systems of education and health care. That system has not collapsed the way that Communism tumbled alongside the Berlin Wall. To the contrary, the true leaders-from-behind like Nikki Haley and Sen. Lindsey Graham now feel comfortable, finally, with taking down the Confederate flag because so many of the warped policies carried out in its shadow are still flying so high.

The fall of the Confederate flag is just, righteous, and long overdue. And it even feel exhilarating to watch. But it is only the first step of a long Shermanesque march against social injustice. Lowering the Stars and Bars won't mean too much until we finally raise up all of the citizens of the American South.