For all those to whom the Confederate battle flag is a symbol of hate or racism, the lowering of the banner at South Carolina's Capitol in Columbia on Friday was a moment of triumph. For those few who spent their miserable lives looking at the flag as a symbol of white supremacy, it was a moment of defeat.
For everyone else, those who go to work every day, pay their taxes, try to raise their children with a sense of right and wrong, those for whom the flag is no more than an image on the page of a history book, life didn't change.
But they do wonder. They wonder if it will make the first group less angry and the second group more angry. Or vice versa.
They wonder whether the lowering of the Confederate flag is the end of something or the beginning of something. Is it the action that finally silences those who don't want to live in harmony with the ancestors of slaves or is it the first of many similar battles - death by a thousands cuts - to play out across the country concerning the attempted removal or erasure of anything that remotely has to do with the losing side in the Civil War.
History tells us that many Southern states did not traffic in the Confederate battle flag until the approach of the 100th anniversary of the Civil War unhappily coincided with the first shots in the battle for civil rights.
Mississippians, for instance, waved the flag in protest following the unveiling of civil rights proposals by President Harry Truman in 1948, and many Southern supporters adopted it as the unofficial flag of the Dixiecrat party in the 1948 presidential election. Georgia adopted a state flag that included the Confederate battle banner in 1956 (and removed it in 2001). South Carolina did not fly the battle flag over its Capitol until 1962. The state of Alabama raised the flag above its Capitol building in 1963 but didn't replace it after taking it down for renovations in 1992). Florida flew the Confederate standard at its new Capitol building's west entrance as one of four "national" flags from 1978 to 2001.
Those actions alone signal why the flag made a comeback and why it now must leave.
Going forward, for Southern states and for the rest of the country, the flag itself should play the only part it deserves to play. As the prologue in the movie "Gone With the Wind" reads: "Look for it only in books ... A civilization gone with the wind "