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autographedcatIt's almost a religion in the South.
The Civil War, that grand and bloody conflict that ripped our nation asunder in the middle of the nineteenth century, was not really about slavery. Our noble ancestors were fighting, you see, for the great cause of States Rights, resisting the ever growing threat of a massive Imperial Federal Government that would one day soon threaten our lives, our liberty, and even the very idea of the American Way Of Life. What those patriotic men, nay heroes, were fighting for was not slavery, but the principle of Individual Liberty.
Rubbish.
The Civil War was fought, entirely and without exception, over the idea that it was right and proper for one man to be able to own another man as property. The Civil War was fought over the idea that holding another human in servitude to perform labour on your behalf was not only moral, but indeed the way things should be, as handed down by God Himself.
A great many men who fought and died on both sides of this conflict were not involved in these issues. They were soldiers who were told when and where to fight, and they fought. But make no mistake, the leaders who directed that fight, who decided WHY that fight must happen, did so because they feared they would lose their God-given right to hold humans in bondage for their own economic convenience.
An article published recently in the New York Review of Books provides some excellent background material as it reviews several books on this subject. If what I said above makes you at all uncomfortable with your view of the glorious past of the Confederacy, perhaps some of them should be on your reading list.
Continuing to glorify and ennoble a war that was neither glorious nor noble will only continue to create tension between people. Recently, a school district banned clothing which featured the Confederate battle flag emblem. This has been widely controversial, and one student was quoted as saying that blacks "weren't offended" by them, a statement which would be funny if it wasn't so absurd. Whether or not people ought to be offended by something like the confederate battle flag is one thing, but to suggest that they simply, as a whole, are not is to demonstrate an extraordinary amount of denial.
What it all boils down to, at the end of the day, is respect. Do I find it distressing that people would choose to continue obsessively worrying over things that happened 150 years ago instead of putting their efforts into bettering today and tomorrow? Yes, absolutely. But until such time as the majority, especially in the south, show that they can let go of their own cultural baggage, it's too much to expect the minority to assume that the past is the past.
The deep and fundamental truth is that, in the end, there are no white people and no black people. There's just people. If a piece of cloth is capable of creating such fundamental divisions between us, then we owe it to each other to put that aside so that we can grow as one people towards tomorrow.
The Civil War, that grand and bloody conflict that ripped our nation asunder in the middle of the nineteenth century, was not really about slavery. Our noble ancestors were fighting, you see, for the great cause of States Rights, resisting the ever growing threat of a massive Imperial Federal Government that would one day soon threaten our lives, our liberty, and even the very idea of the American Way Of Life. What those patriotic men, nay heroes, were fighting for was not slavery, but the principle of Individual Liberty.
Rubbish.
The Civil War was fought, entirely and without exception, over the idea that it was right and proper for one man to be able to own another man as property. The Civil War was fought over the idea that holding another human in servitude to perform labour on your behalf was not only moral, but indeed the way things should be, as handed down by God Himself.
A great many men who fought and died on both sides of this conflict were not involved in these issues. They were soldiers who were told when and where to fight, and they fought. But make no mistake, the leaders who directed that fight, who decided WHY that fight must happen, did so because they feared they would lose their God-given right to hold humans in bondage for their own economic convenience.
An article published recently in the New York Review of Books provides some excellent background material as it reviews several books on this subject. If what I said above makes you at all uncomfortable with your view of the glorious past of the Confederacy, perhaps some of them should be on your reading list.
Continuing to glorify and ennoble a war that was neither glorious nor noble will only continue to create tension between people. Recently, a school district banned clothing which featured the Confederate battle flag emblem. This has been widely controversial, and one student was quoted as saying that blacks "weren't offended" by them, a statement which would be funny if it wasn't so absurd. Whether or not people ought to be offended by something like the confederate battle flag is one thing, but to suggest that they simply, as a whole, are not is to demonstrate an extraordinary amount of denial.
What it all boils down to, at the end of the day, is respect. Do I find it distressing that people would choose to continue obsessively worrying over things that happened 150 years ago instead of putting their efforts into bettering today and tomorrow? Yes, absolutely. But until such time as the majority, especially in the south, show that they can let go of their own cultural baggage, it's too much to expect the minority to assume that the past is the past.
The deep and fundamental truth is that, in the end, there are no white people and no black people. There's just people. If a piece of cloth is capable of creating such fundamental divisions between us, then we owe it to each other to put that aside so that we can grow as one people towards tomorrow.
