I wish I was in the land of cotton. . .

. . . oh that's right, I already am.

And so are a lot of other people who, I think, are still working through the final vestiges of the Civil War.

Let me explain.

Following the president's State of the Union speech last month, a New York Times commentator said that the country's political climate has not been so polarized since the Civil War.  And in the month since that speech, the climate has grown even worse as the Republican party holds the rest of us hostage to its narrow, privileged platform--determined to defeat President Obama regardless of the cost.

Enter "Dixie": the 2012 electoral map that shows all of the old Confederacy, except for Virginia, as solidly red.  Call me whatever you want for raising the issue of race, but I think the election--and then, to top it off, the reelection--of a black man reignited the smoldering ashes of Atlanta, Richmond, and Gettysburg.  One hundred fifty years is not that long for a nation to recover from such a traumatic war--a war that was fought largely over the place of the black man and the states' rights to determine that place.

That a black man now sits at the top (with his black family living in that whitest of white houses) has taxed some people so much that they can only lash out--which is exactly what's happening.  And isn't the word "sequester" an interesting one as the focus of all the rage?  It sounds ominously like "secession" and means essentially the same thing as "segregation."

The writer of "Dixie" had it right: "Old times there are not forgotten."  Someday they will be, I feel certain.  But in the meantime, those who wish to remember are choosing to destroy whatever they can on their way down.

The End of the World

I laughed (along with lots of people) at Harold Camping's apocalyptic prediction this week. On Sunday afternoon I told my family I would be leaving them soon, and at 6:00 that night--when the rapture was supposed to start--I said, "I feel like I'm floating." The jokes about these supposed ends of the world are themselves endless.

But then on Tuesday The New York Times ran two articles together: one on Camping's revised prediction that both the rapture and the world's end will arrive now on October 21, and one on the aftermath of the Joplin tornado--the search for the living and the dead. In reading the articles I realized that the monster tornado hit Joplin around the same time that Camping's saved souls were supposed to be ascending to heaven. At around the same time that the rest of us would begin our hell on earth.

Which is exactly what happened in Joplin, Missouri.

We don't need firebrand preachers and Bible-waving soothsayers to remind us that the end of the world arrives every day for someone somewhere on the globe. If we forget, we're quickly reminded by storms or by illness or by death.

If the rapture ever comes, it will surely take all of us for none of us deserves the suffering we endure. It's part of being human.

Veterans Through the Ages

The North Carolina Monument at Gettysburg honors our state's 14,147 soldiers who fought there in 1863. Close to 6,000 North Carolinians lost their lives in 3 days at Gettysburg, over 1/4 of all Confederate casualties.

To date, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have claimed nearly 5,800 American lives.

Does it matter how many die? Civil War numbers boggle the mind. Iraq and Afghanistan numbers, in comparison, seem like mere skirmishes. Many of us don't know anyone who's been killed this time around; I doubt if many southerners could say the same in 1863.

The dead, no matter how many they are, ask little of us. We, in turn, pay almost no attention to them. Perhaps on this Veteran's Day we can be reminded of the simple request made clear by this monument: May "[our] valorous deeds [be] enshrined in the hearts of men long after these transient memorials have crumbled into dust."