It has been with no small amount of puzzlement that I have read the multitude of mea culpas gushing from some of my former newspaper colleagues, many of whom are sons of the South, decrying the sins of the South following the wanton murders of nine people in a church in Charleston, S.C., last month. My puzzlement stems from this: If you are so ashamed of where you were born and raised and the heritage that is a part of the South, why did it take so long and why did it take the deaths of nine innocent people to reach the conclusions that you did? Equally puzzling has been their complicity in this rush to rid the world of all things that remind us of the South’s role in the Civil War, including the Confederate battle flag, statues and memorials to the Confederacy and, even more absurdly, suggesting that military posts that bear the names of Confederate generals be renamed since those men were “traitors” to the United States.