Across the South, the Confederate flag keeps coming down.

We should replace it with the white flag of surrender.

David Cook

David Cook

Photo by Ashlee Culverhouse /Times Free Press.

It is time Dixie surrenders, again, and once and for all. It is time we acknowledge that fighting the Civil War was a tragic, violent mistake — slavery a hellish, moral-less enterprise, and states' rights a Trojan horse to allow it — as are the ongoing political-culture wars we've been fighting ever since.

Dixie was on the wrong side of Jim Crow.

Was on the wrong side of the civil rights movement.

Wrong about gay rights and gay marriage.

And wrong to have allowed the Confederate flag to fly for so long over state, county and city governments.

Morally, it is a good thing to have been defeated at so many turns; a good thing we lost to the North and Lincoln's vision for an emancipated and unified nation, a good thing segregation fell apart, and a good thing the Confederate flag is coming down. The arc of the moral universe is long, Martin Luther King Jr. said, but always, one way or another, bends toward justice.

And it is bending now.

Within that bending is Dixie's latest defeat.

Ever since Reconstruction, we in Dixie have confused a respect for tradition and the past with a begrudging slowness to evolve morally into our best, most ethical selves. Why else has the South been stand-in-the-schoolhouse-door-wrong on so many moral, conscientious issues? It is one thing to love and hold onto the Old Ways. It is quite another to oppose human rights.

I do not write this lightly. Dixie is undergoing what the Gospel calls a winnowing of the spirit; the wheat is being pulled from the chaff, and this is painful to many. Yet just as we surrendered at Appomattox, it is time Dixie surrenders what is left of the false part of our Southern self — the swampy, secessionary part that produced segregation, Bull Connor, lynching (from Texas to the Walnut Street Bridge) and the same Confederate flag Dylann Roof posed with before shooting up a Charleston church.

Lowering the flag is an act of surrender, giving the message that we in the South desire racial reconciliation, justice and fairness more than eternalizing the Confederacy. That it is time to revere the civil rights movement with as much adoration and historical fervency as we use memorializing the Civil War.

And that even if we see the Confederate flag as an innocent symbol of Southern heritage, we have enough empathy, imagination and compassion to understand how it far greater represents a painful history of night-riding violence and slave-owning oppression. Therefore, out of love for our black neighbors, we would gladly, humbly, fold up the flag.

And in doing so, we surrender ourselves to the greater and more eternal work of racial fellowship, turn-the-other-cheek courage and the ongoing construction of the beautiful, beloved community in the South.

Contact David Cook at dcook@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6329. Follow him on Facebook at DavidCookTFP.