The site of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's surrender. Do we have to do this again?
On April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee exited the McClean home in Appomattox, Virginia, having signed documents surrendering his army to U.S. General Ulysses S. Grant. Only hours earlier, Lee's troops were fighting furiously, in spite of being on the brink of starvation and having done great damage to both the nation and themselves. Hoped-for provisions for Lee's army failed to materialize, and then even Lee had to admit that surrender was a better option for a dignified conclusion to his army's fate than creeping off into the woods to conduct an endless guerrilla war against the Union.
The Civil War, it seemed, was over.
Yet nearly 150 years later, the so-called Tea Party, heirs to the Confederate cause, were still storming the Union in Congress and elsewhere, continuing a fight against its enduring goals. Like Lee's army, they tried to bring their fight into their enemy's own territory at the bequest of elites resenting democratic institutions, no matter the cost to the nation that those institutions served. Like Lee, they met with an enemy finally resolved to only one outcome: unconditional surrender. On the evening of October 16th, their surrender was complete.
Or was it? More after the break.
Like Lee, House Speaker John Boehner was immediately lionized for leading the Tea Party into the extremes of whatever it would take to prove their cause right and just, in spite of his ultimate failure to deliver a Tea Party victory. Like Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Senator Ted Cruz wandered around at the fringes of the final outcome, disempowered, ranting, and promising final revenge, even as he headed for the exit. In the middle were the Republicans who had come to fear the outcome of rebelling against the vindictive Tea Party overlords who promised their undoing in primaries if they were to dare to speak rationally against their cause, resigned to surrendering but many refusing to accept it.
History repeats itself, though never perfectly. The same sorrowful lessons learned by the Confederacy in the Civil War have come back to haunt the nation, and for many of the same reasons. Yet, fortunately, we have come to a moment of uneasy peace, with the sorrow replaced by suddenly strange normalcy. Businesses and government offices reopen. People expect things to be done in a regular way. And grudges, whether justified or not, seem no longer as important as avoiding further self-destruction.
It will take years, perhaps even many generations, for this peace to become truly just and lasting. Our nation was founded imperfectly, promising freedom and equality and yet at the same time denying it. We have never overcome those fundamental contradictions completely. Yet as the demographics of our nation's population shift, we have no choice but to accept them if we are to succeed. Politics based on turning back the clock have failed miserably. While the victory last night does not commit the nation to moving forward, it does offer the promise of closing the chapter in our history that presumed that money, power and deceit could lure people into a past that was idealized but never really attainable.
The south's victory in the Civil War, while always a possibility even until the very end, was never probable, and based not on rational need or fundamental truths but on wishful thinking and pride. It was a cause based on self-aggrandizement in the face of change, not the belief in a greater good through change. Insecure Americans in our own time, seeking a more secure self-image in the face of our own changing times, embraced the slick packaging of modern politics in Confederate rags. What they failed to realize is that the armies that they assembled through their votes and complicity in the Tea Party uprising were not there to serve them, but to use them for the purposes of a shady elite. Pride dies hard, and so the Tea Party was able to ride into battle with flags held high by people afraid of the future.
Now that future is upon us, and we have no choice but to face it soberly together as a nation. Global resources for a booming world population are limited. Our own nation is a country of many races and faiths, all of them needed to work on a better way of living, for our mutual benefit and for the world's benefit. As with the conclusion of the Civil War, we need to be careful about how we proceed in our politics from this point forward. We cannot afford to allow a majority of people in our nation to be held hostage to a regressive and selfish minority, but we need to respect that our nation exists to benefit all of its citizens.
Abraham Lincoln advised in his second inaugural address that the eminent end to the Civil War was a time to proceed "malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right." We need to be patient with those who still feel wounded from our recent experiences of self-destructiveness, and patient with ourselves as we assemble a working majority in Congress to deal with the nation's problems more sanely. People foolish enough to follow the Tea Party have created their own punishment; we need to be careful about not adding more, but to concentrate on helping the nation to form a constructive path forward.
If we negotiate the next two years in this spirit whilst attaining the needed goals of political and governmental reform, then we stand a very good chance of establishing a strong and broad new spirit of moving our nation forward. It is said that in the wake of the Civil War that Americans shifted from saying "The United States are" to "The United States is" when referring to our nation. Let's hope that a similar spirit of unity and good will can lead us forward from the ashes of this sad and bitter battle.