Confederate flag and violence column

With the furor over the Confederate flag being displayed in the South, I was reminded that forest Park has a statue commemorating the confederacy. Then, I remembered that we have a 58 foot high obelisk in a Confederate Cemetery, on Rozier Street that marks over 1300 confederate prisoners who died of smallpox and other illnesses in the prison in Alton. Remains of the prison wall can be seen not all that far from the site of the last Lincoln-Douglas debate.

It is remarkably unadorned. The grass is thick and was recently mown when i was there. Some stately trees grace the entrance walk up the hill with a few hosta plants. Nothing lauds the Confederacy; the monument lists the names of those who died in the prison.

When I lived in North Carolina for a few years, I shopped for groceries at the Winn-Dixie, where they sold Dixie beer. It was reached on the Jefferson Davis highway (his statue is in the Capitol building in Washington). A statue of a Confederate soldier stood at one of the main entrance sot the University of North Carolina. Now, Saunders Hall, named for a Confederate soldier and historian, but also a founder of KKK in North Carolina, was just voted by the trustees to be renamed, just a month ago. Maybe we are reaching a watershed moment, similar to the antismoking wave years ago, with a sudden consensus emerging against Confederate symbols, after 150 years.

Eminent Theologian Paul Tillich thought long and hard on symbols. “Symbols point beyond themselves to something else...It participates in that to which it points: the flag participates in the power and dignity of the nation for which it stands. Therefore, it cannot be replaced except after an historic catastrophe that changes the reality of the nation which it symbolizes. An attack on the flag is felt as an attack on the majesty of the group in which it is acknowledged. .. a symbol  opens up levels of reality which otherwise are closed for us. Symbols which have an especially social function... They grow when the situation is ripe for them, and they die when the situation changes. The symbol of the "king" grew in a special period of history, and it died in most parts of the world in our period. Symbols do not grow because people are longing for them, and they do not die because of scientific or practical criticism. They die because they can no longer produce response in the group where they originally found expression.” He fully realized that symbols can be confused with what they are to symbolize, and they become important in themselves.

Symbols make up part of what Robert Bellah called civil religion. Relics are venerated and displayed, but symbols carry real potency. Yes, they can be multivalent, as one sees heritage and ancestors, and another see a flag whose purpose was to protect and expand slavery.

While I am pleased to see Confederate symbols taken from public buildings in the South, I remain stunned that it is taking up the oxygen of another potent force in American public life: gun violence. I just read that in this new century at least 48 of our citizens lost their lives to purveyors of racist invective and action. The President has been a pastoral presence in statements of 14 different mass slayings. I wonder about our sudden desire to sanitize the public space from Confederate symbols, but we seem to be able to gather little energy in dealing with the plague of violence in our homes and communities. Removing confederate symbols may honor the dead in Charleston and give racism one less symbol, but the violence of our country hangs over all of us, like a shroud.