ArcaMax

Could this, at last, be the end of the Civil War?

Or, as some fans of Southern heritage call it, the War Between the States?

Or the War of Northern Aggression?

That question came to mind as I watched South Carolina's Republican Gov. Nikki Haley do what I thought I might not live to see a South Carolina governor do. She called for the removal of the Confederate flag that still flies on the state capitol grounds.

Standing with her were the state's two Republican senators, Tim Scott and Lindsey Graham. All three had migrated over the weekend from positions of passive support to outright opposition to the flying of that flag over the birthplace of the rebellion that it represents.

Sadly, it took the massacre of nine people in Charleston's historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church to shock them and other leaders of goodwill to take this step, long-urged by African-Americans and others who see the flag as little more than a symbol of racism.

That's an old fight that threatens once again to be an issue in the current presidential race. But if anything helped trigger a widespread change of heart after the horror at "Mother Emanuel" church, I think it was the stunningly heartfelt sentiments of the victims' relatives who spoke directly to the accused gunman at his first court appearance -- and offered their forgiveness.

One by one, those who chose to speak offered him forgiveness and said they were praying for his soul and hoped he would repent, even as they described the pain of their losses.

"I forgive you," Nadine Collier, the daughter of 70-year-old Ethel Lance, said as the accused gunman Dylann Roof, 21, sat passively. "You took something very precious from me. I will never talk to her again. I will never, ever hold her again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul."

How many of the rest of us, I wondered, would have the internal fortitude to show such grace in the face of immeasurable loss and injustice?

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(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.