Does the Confederacy Haunt Us?
Could the spirit of
the Confederacy live on in this country, unacknowledged yet invidious, virulent
and internecine? The sense that we are
about to tear ourselves apart in an orgy of violence is palpable. To answer why, it is time to consider an hypothesis: the civil war has never left us; it only shifted from physical
battle to psychological warfare. Although it is not generally part of the
national consciousness, a passive aggressive undercurrent, pushing to topple the
United States, is on the verge of erupting in cataclysmic, pyrrhic success.
We today can realistically
imagine the frustration and division in our antebellum nation, because there’s
a lot of evidence we are on the verge of a great schism. Complete disagreement stokes a rancorous
tension between the two sides. A faction
of one of these sides stormed our Capitol on January 6, seeking to install a
would-be king as our president, and hence destroy our centuries-old Republic. Despite denials of Trumpites and of Trump
himself, and especially their gaslit claims to be saving the country, the
vector of the insurrectionist momentum is charismatic dictatorship under a
golden T.
In all but declared
intent, an attempt is being made to destroy the United States of America. In all ways but honesty, a large political force
seeks that destruction. This has
happened before. Are there historical
connections?
There is a
continuous thread of hatred and racism, going back to the abhorrent defense of White
Supremacy in the 19th century. The Civil
War was fought to preserve slavery. The
song ‘The Good Old Rebel’, written by a former Confederate in the 1860’s, right
after the war, proclaims, “I hates the Constitution and the great Republic,
too. I hates the Freedman’s Buro in
uniforms of blue.”
After it became
impossible to openly keep slavery legal, the White patriarchy of the South
focused on rights-denial for Blacks and violently retaking what was lost during
Reconstruction. The result was Jim Crow
and outright terrorizing and massacre of Blacks. True freedom wasn’t seriously on the table until
the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s.
And yet, recent attempts to gut the Voting Right Act have largely
succeeded.
The great curse of racism,
arising from the Civil War, lives on. So
does its hate. And it has become a spirit
of contumacious and rebellious unwillingness to budge, not only on racism, but
other rights issues. In The Lie that
Binds, Ilyse Hogue demonstrates how anti-abortionism replaced segregation
as the spearhead of a highly organized evangelical effort to impose a White
Christian nationalism. Our nation is divided
in war-ready rancor on issues like women’s rights, LGBTQ and gun control.
Frustration froths in
the fault lines of our tense partisan politics.
Instead of working together to deal with school shootings, nothing gets
done. We can’t even begin to protect our
children from shooters. Could it be more
frustrating? A state with, say, five
million citizens, rolls five million dice every day--to see if just one out of
those millions, for whatever crazy or evil reason, decides that this is the day
to join a growing trend and kill innocent people en masse. How does this situation not foster a
nation-destroying hate?
No one is
consciously trying to destroy our country by inaction on mass shootings. But it is telling that there is perhaps no
better way to destroy a country. Such basic
failure, to even try something, on a situation so heart-wrenching, evil and
dire, seems almost guaranteed to tear our nation apart.
In 1996, faced with
a mass shooting, Britain changed its gun laws, and the Brits have suffered few mass
shooting since. But we in the USA let
mass shooting multiply and metastasize through the national fabric. Why?
It stokes
infuriation. Gun deaths are ripping our
country apart, but no one in power will admit it. No one will act. It seems an apt metaphor, at the very least,
that the ghost of the Confederacy is laughing, finally on the verge of its
victory over the Republic.
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