Union soldiers entrenched along the west bank of the Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg, Virginia (111-B-157)
I see the cracks in the foundations of my country and wonder if anything I do, if the words I write might help stop it from crumbling.
Are we capable of embracing our adversaries with love and kindness? Will the war of ideologies ever be over?
Can we ever move past the racism, which is embedded within the heart of the country?
Are any of us free? Have we ever been?
How many more lives must be given?
Why do so many automatically bend the knee?
Near the end of Ken Burns’ 1990 documentary on the Civil War, Historian Barbara Fields said, “I think what we need to remember most of all is that the Civil War is not over until we, today, have done our part in fighting it, as well as understanding what happened when the Civil War generation fought it.
“William Faulkner said once that History is not ‘was,’ it’s ‘is,’ and what we need to remember about the Civil War is that the Civil War is in the present as well as the past. The generation that fought the war, the generation that argued over the definition of the war, the generation that had to pay the price in blood, that had to pay the price in blasted hopes and a lost future, also established a standard that will not mean anything until we have finished the work.
“You can say slavery doesn’t exist anymore. We’re all citizens. But if we’re all citizens, then we have a task to do to make sure that that, too, is not a joke. If some citizens live in houses and others on the street, the Civil War is still going on. It’s still to be fought, and regrettably, it can still be lost.”
The boys of the Civil War came home as old men. I don’t think most people today know or understand the devastation of war, of what those battles take from you.
It sickens me to be able to visualize the visceral words from one of the soldier’s writings of being “knee-deep in the blood of your brethren,” and wonder if it is something I will now see in my lifetime as a civilian.
As my country becomes even more divided, I truly hope our differences can be solved with words and laws rather than blood-soaked murderous rages.
Life is not black and white, and the grays of the Civil War continue to haunt us today, teaching us all to try to be a better, more empathetic people.
I still don’t know if we will ever learn this lesson.
I don’t know if we can ever come back from where we are today. The damage is done. No one outside of America will ever trust us again. It will take at least a decade after this regime is gone before anyone will even think of investing here. Trust is much harder to recover. This American Empire decided to purposely shit itself and give up on everything for everyone to enrich a few. Everything is for sale, including our souls and our integrity.
We have lost the respect we had earned. We threw away the good will of the last 80 years. We voluntarily gave up our prestige and turned on our neighbors for a cheap, glittering coin to enrich ourselves while everything else rots. The American Empire is gone. We are sifting through its ashes. I only hope, with everything burned to the ground, we can embrace a new progress and build something new and better than what we had.