What is the appropriate way to mark the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War?
Five years and the blood of six hundred thousand Americans were poured onto our soil, to settle the right of states to erect a hierarchy of God’s children, and then terrorize those destined to inhabit the muddy realm somewhere below His grace.
We speak hopefully, of wounds healing, of society’s evolution. We march and we legislate, to drag the recalcitrant into the light of a just world.
Yet, the blood of that rebellion will not evaporate...
Yet, the blood of that rebellion will not evaporate, as long as its coppery bouquet is reverently savored by the heirs of vanquished traitors. It wicks and soaks and swells the aquifers of Hell.
Even as we hope that the river has been forced into an unreachable place, has dried to but a historic stain, the heirs of bludgeoned rebels must slake their thirst, and though we believe we are parching and draining their sustenance, they are dowsing for more, they are tasting the earth to sink ever deeper wells, drilling and blasting through our best intentions and our hope for fully realized humanity, to slake the depraved thirst that will not die.
Every corpse at a traffic stop? Dowsing for blood.
Lies of electoral fraud? 30 states attempting to restrain the eligible from voting? Another hungering well head appears.
Where corrupt webs of laws, fines, and fees impoverish and criminalize 75% of a city’s citizens all to raise revenue to perpetuate that corruption, the heirs of America’s homegrown enemies are twisting the faucet and licking their lips in anticipation.
When the election of a nonwhite citizen brings the heirs of treason to their hind legs, braying sentiments which had lately been the province only of isolated, angry barflies, but are now in heavy rotation on a leading news network; while caricatures of witch doctors, nappy-headed clowns, and vulgar insults to the families of public servants are proffered as “ideas to be freely exchanged”; when a public official of mixed Anglo/native American ancestry is sneeringly addressed as “Pocahontas”: This is how the heirs of our traitors kneel, baptising themselves at the ancient stigmata, warm and wet once more, of America’s original sin.
Can our nation survive while nurturing the fragile honor of those who would have destroyed us? No.
Must the next iteration of Sherman’s march be, not from Atlanta, but from sea to shining sea? Not in a nation that can appraise its derelictions as keenly as it does its most noble aspirations.
The Congress, in our democracy dedicated to equality under the law, should declare April 9th to be a federal holiday, marking America’s first triumph in the unending struggle for human dignity. As a corollary, not one cent of federal revenue should fund the construction nor maintenance of any Confederate memorial, grave, nor the site of any momentary traitor’s victory over what Abraham Lincoln prayed were The Better Angels of Our Nature.