BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  JUL 2

Charleston has now buried its dead. The nine victims of Dylan Roof have been immortalized.

The families of the victims have reacted with truly amazing grace, not sung but practiced. They have offered one of the most difficult yet most meaningful gifts one human being can offer another — forgiveness.

“I just wanted everybody to know to you I forgive you,” Nadine Collier, the daughter of victim Ethel Lance, said to Roof during his first court appearance. “We are here to combat hate-filled actions with love-filled actions,” Alana Simmons, who lost her grandfather, Pastor Daniel L. Simmons Sr., said.

The victims’ relatives, seemed to have received the spiritual nourishment that the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, pastor of the landmark Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, instilled in all of his flock, as both a preacher and a politician (he was the youngest African-American ever elected to the South Carolina legislature). He was by all accounts, before he, too, was gunned down, a leader and mentor who saw life and lived life through the prism of faith and divine inspiration. He was described as a giant.

The people of Charleston reacted to the killings with peaceful solemnity, respectful and protective of their community, unlike other scenes of racial tension, such as Baltimore, New York, and Ferguson.

Beyond reaction in Charleston human nature was on display in other forms. The most unnerving elements were those of the racists and radicals across the spectrum from white supremacists to angry blacks. The white supremacists feigned outrage while seemingly angry blacks such as Yale University’s Chris Lebron, writing in the New York Times declared it is time  “to make black radicalism central to black politics and activism.”

The racial spectrum appears less populated at those extremes. The racial hate, agitation and anger, thankfully, are tempered and muzzled by the intolerance of the rest of us. But they, the Louis Farrakhans, Rev. Jeremiah Wrights among blacks at one end and the white Supremacists at the other, make the discussion of race so much more difficult, and, no doubt, they know it and relish it.

A second element who do disservice to Charleston is the exploiter, the worst among them, television personalities such as Don Lemon, who use tragic incidents such as this one as a platform for hyperbole, incitement, and visual theater. It’s apparently a money maker, exploiting public anger, fear, and ignorance. Lemon is but one of many. Rev. Al Sharpton, who, like Lemon, makes news and then reports it, is another. The exploiters wasted no time creating Madison Avenue branding– “the Emanuel Nine”–for marketing effect.

A third element is what I call the narrativist (I just made up the term), those who use incidents such as these to spin their story lines and versions of reality unhampered by lack of fact or reason.

Steve Doocy, of Fox News, for example, apparently implied one morning after the Roof attack that the motive was religious and not racial. He was immediately trumped by the Washington Post’s Janell Ross, who implied that Republicans as a class were in denial about the attack being motivated by racial hatred, and even came up with preposterous reasons why. Columnist Jonathan Capehart advanced a similar narrative, insisting that the entire Republican Party “needs to catch up with Hillary Clinton on race.” It is a familiar commentary, supported not by fact, but by prejudice and political and ideological opportunism, that Republicans, i.e. conservatives, are racist and the modern Republican Party is founded on racism.

Akin to that is applying a political slant to everything. Much to my chagrin, someone I greatly admire criticized Former Texas Governor Rick Perry on Facebook for what seemed to be one of his classic mispronunciations using the term “accident” instead of “incident.” Another criticism was directed at former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee for saying that if someone else in that Bible study class had been armed, others might have lived.

There was no mention of the black activist, writing in the New York Times, who came to the same fairly logical, if not politically-incorrect conclusion. For their utterances, a Facebook respondent called Perry and Huckabee “morons.” Neither of them, of course, come close to moronic intelligence. Put aside Perry’s difficulty with the language, his record as Governor in Texas is marked by some impressive achievements that make him a worthy candidate for higher office, whatever your ideological prejudices. The same is true of Huckabee in Arkansas.   But, alas, they are “conservative” Republicans and that alone makes their behavior and intellectual capacity suspect.

A fourth element is the symbolist, those who believe that a symbolic response to a profound incident is equal in weight to a more substantive response. The intense and enduring focus on the removal of the Confederate flag from our line of vision in the aftermath of Charleston was and is a perfect example. It cannot and should not be denied that the removal of the flag from everything from flagpoles and fence posts to under garments and license plates, spoke volumes about our collective reaction to the Charleston murders, society’s intolerance for racial bigotry, and the darkness, which shall forever be, our past. It was one more step in a never-ending journey away from those chapters in our history.

Removing the flag from the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol, Governor Nikki Haley, said, “We have stared evil in the eye and watched good prayerful people killed in one of the most sacred of places. We are hurt and broken and we needed to heal. “

Unfortunately, as earnest, soothing, and frankly legitimate many symbolic responses are, they are often mistaken for and end up substituting for or distracting from, more substantive change. Removal of the flag does not rid our world of the other symbols of that dark past, nor does it assure more transformational change.

One of the gateways to our nation’s capitol is Jefferson Davis Highway and one of the great monuments to our institutions of government is a Senate Office Building named after Georgia Senator Richard Russell, who opposed desegregation of the South. There are surrounding us an infinite number of symbols of all kinds of social, economic, political, and spiritual misdeeds and regrets. We cannot eliminate them all and trying would only exhaust resources and energy needed for more noble pursuits.

So profound questions loom large: How do we best honor the victims of Charleston? How do we ensure that this tragedy won’t disappear from the headlines and our consciousness next week or the week after? How do we ensure that we won’t be distracted by related but irrelevant concerns like the cancellation of Dukes of Hazard reruns?

I don’t know. I don’t know, either, how we ever get to that national conversation about race that for some reason is the ultimate, if unachievable goal of so many.

My friend, the late Bill Gavin, told me years ago there is no good outcome from a conversation in which the two sides do not trust the motivation of the other. And regrettably, those individuals usually thought to be the best to conduct a conversation about race—the activists, the politicians, academics, the authors—are those who seem to question each others’ motivations the most often. They usually cannot extract the politics and prejudice, the suspicion and ulterior motives, from their own discourse.

It is hard to even write about race. My daughter asked me after the Trayvon Martin killing why I never wrote about it. I told her little good can come of it. What good does it do to write or talk when each and every word written or spoken is subject to suspicion or negative interpretation? The only alternative is to sanitize, homogenize, and qualify what you say or write to such an extent no one has any idea what the hell you’re talking about.

What I do suspect is that our focus on race detracts from the larger and more profoundly damaging questions of inequality in our society, primarily in our economy, that may not be the result of racism, but in fact may exacerbate it.

The real evil is the gross inequality between and among those who have opportunity and hope and those who don’t, regardless of their race, regardless of their color, regardless of their ethnicity, or gender, or age, or disability.

It is the inequality of education and educational opportunity; inequality in access to health care, and good nutrition. It is the inevitable inequality that will separate and discriminate against those without access to, knowledge of, and aptitude for technological advancement, particularly the poor and aged. It is inequality in the dispensation of justice. And it is the inequality that results from the absence of family, family values, work ethic, mentorship, spiritual guidance, and the development of self-discipline.

That is the challenge of our time, as human beings trying to live together, as people who are trying to govern themselves.

Government can decrease inequality and increase opportunity and hope, but government can’t do it all or even most. We know that. It takes more.

We know, too, it takes more than talk. Improving our schools, for example, ensuring that the quality of education in Buffalo County, South Dakota, one of the poorest, is equal to that in Loudoun County, Virginia, one of the richest, ensuring that teachers and textbooks, computers and buildings are the best they can be everywhere, takes so much more than talk.

It should not be too much to ask, but it is. First, we have to get along. So where do we begin, again? Maybe we should hear more from the people of Charleston.

Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.