healing the longterm collective racebased wounds to the psyches and emotions of americans will not be an easy or expeditious task but it must be done if we are to have the type of healthy strong and united nation needed to survive an otherwise volatile and unpredictable world a searching moral inventory americas opportunity to avoid the haunting selfdestruction of racism whatever the confederate flag may have represented in the past it is now understood by most people to stand for hate and racism there is no reason to treat it any differently than we treat the nazi swastika why take down a historic flag