4 Ways we’re still fighting the Civil War
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
You don’t have to tour a battlefield to understand the Civil War. Look at today’s headlines. As the nation commemorates the 150th anniversary of its deadliest war this week, some historians say we’re still fighting over some of the same issues that fueled the Civil War.
“There are all of these weird parallels,” says Stephanie McCurry, author of “Confederate Reckoning,” a new book that examines why Southerners seceded and its effect on Southern women and slaves.
“When you hear charges today that the federal government is overreaching, and the idea that the Constitution recognized us as a league of sovereign states — these were all part of the secessionist charges in 1860,” she says.
One of the biggest debates during the Civil War was how far should governments go in dictating our lives. We still debate those politics.
–William Blair, Civil War historian
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We think the above article makes a good point that is becoming more evident as the Budget Crisis continues. First the US broke into “Red States” and “Blue States”, which is a step beyond describing differences of opinion expressed through political party lines. There are definite regional differences that due bear considerable ideological similarities with a civil war fought 150 years ago. It appears not to be over, but rather back in the throes of it.
States rights have surfaced as a major example. Democracy, and the will of the majority is not acceptable. The conservative regions have not mounted an attack directly on blacks, but have tried a more subtle attack on race through immigration policy. And while the conservatives could accept the taxation (for now) to provide some funds for Medicaid, it’s distribution would be at the discretion of the individuals of a state through their governor, not the federal government. An example of this is the fight over funding of Planned Parenthood and women’s health. Unfortunately, this is will impact the poor far more than those who are well off and can pay for any service they want. There is a deep rooted sense of ‘worthiness’ that the conservatives would like to reserve for themselves, rather than national democratic sentiment.
Indeed, there is demonizing, biblical rhetoric, and a call to be left alone to make local decisions that are local (state), rather than federal. For all the talk of compromising, there is a disturbing disappearance of the political center. The US would seem not so much in a financial debate, as a deep rooted ideological one that continues to separate the country in a way parallel to the war fought 150 years ago.
This was written after the First World War, but seems equally relevant to the current federal vs. states’ rights and theological ideological war being fought in the US today.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
“THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
The Queen of Amerindia