There are times that we do not take the time to really praise and honor the people we care and love. As I thought that I would take the time to stop and honor those who have gone before and those who are those who gave up everything, all in an effort to give to us the right to exercise freedom.
As I was talking with a friend this morning, I came to the realization, there are so many people who are out there who get worked up, and they do not understand that there are so many people who died so that we have a right to have our differences of opinion. And there is so much that I will share with you over the following post. But I think that it is important that we recognize the people who have made it possible to walk in the United States of America, and have whatever opinion we might have.
One of the things that I have learned from my parents is that there are places and times to honor the people who have gone before. For many years I have studied the American Civil War in great detail. I wanted to learn about the men who, in the heat of battle had decided that they could not give more to our nation than to give their life. We all know that there are people who have gone to great lengths to give us the rights that we have, and to share those rights with future generations.
I am writing this as I am working my way through Memorial Day weekend. There are multiple events, and we will hear all sorts of stories that we can share with those who are in our lives. I can remember the time I sat with my father, who was a Marine, and he was telling me some of the stories that came with the family. I learned one year that my great grandfather from many generations back, he told me that the ancestor that I was hearing about had taken the time to refuse the donation of boats to George Washington on the night that he planned to cross the Delaware. And while I cannot verify whether this is the point, that we were not all the kind who agreed on everything.
As I can tell you, but that is the thing, I was not always the most attentive person when it came to listening to dad’s stories. And there were times when I just walked out on the conversation, but there were some that I kept hold of over the years. I was not sure that I really treated my father with the respect that I should have had. Still, I knew that my father had gone into the military and he had given his time so that I could have the right to have a difference of opinion.
Over the last couple of weeks, and maybe even months, or years, that the nation has gotten to the point where to have a different opinion is almost a solid fight. Some people who are out there who I can guess that are taking the time to make plans to harm those who do not agree with them.
A few years ago, I went to a friend’s house, and as I sat there, I had heard all these different things, and yet one spent the time to tell me that the one thing that I needed to believe was that the Haitian immigrants were eating the cats and dogs. What I can say about this is that I really never cared what other people did, or what they had to say, but the thing is, that I was seeing the whole issues played out. Hundreds of thousands of men payed the debt so that someone could have that opinion.
We often forget just how delicate our little experiment really is. Even though we are about the 250th anniversary of our nation, but that is the thing, we need to reflect on the fact that here we are on our modern day Memorial Day, but that is the thing is, that if we go back, and we look at what Memorial Day is and it was called originally Decoration Day. I think that we must go back to this, and understand, the first Decoration Day was just after the Civil War had come to a conclusion. As an honor to the men who had paid the ultimate sacrifice, the families were invited to the cemeteries to help decorate those who had fallen.
It was not even a full national holiday, it was done at a few local cemeteries, and then the idea grew. There were members of the families who spread it from one town to another. But that was what they wanted. They did not want the nation to forget that these men had given all.
Did the people of the United States agree with those that were in government to the extent that they all agreed on who was to be voted on? Not on your life. There were differences in political opinion even back to the years between 1865 and 1868. There are so many of these differences as to how to go about allowing the states that had seceded back into the United States. But as we know that there was a large group of representatives who disagreed with the approach that Andrew Johnson was taking, telling people all around them that the President of the United States was messing our nation up. There were those who thought that Johnson was being to lenient in the way that he was re-admitting the states, but there were also though who thought that he was being way too strict.
The truth is, Johnson was acting the way he felt that Lincoln would have, had he still been alive. We find Johnson’s defense falls in keeping with what Lincoln meant when he said: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”
I can assure you, that there are a great many people who understood these words in different ways, but to be clear, we are supposed to move forward with Malice Toward None. What does this mean? It means that Lincoln knew, and this is important, that there were going to be those who had differing opinions on the way things would proceed, but he does not challenge us with just the words above, but rather he brings up the words “with charity for all.” These words are not the language that we typically hear when it comes to passing the baton on. But we need to hear them, because when Lincoln used the word charity, he was not talking what you give to some organization, no, he was talking about showing love to those who differed from us.
I can tell you, over the years, and with visiting many different Civil War and Revolutionary War battlefields, I have seen thousands of graves, but the sad thing, they are not only those of the men who died to give us freedom at the beginning, but rather we need not look all that far away. In many large cities, there is a national cemetery, or if you would rather to walk through the nearby city cemetery this weekend, you will see that there are many who gave their lives. They paid the ultimate price, they went to war and died later, but that is the thing, we must remember that this Memorial Day is not simply a day for us to see the stones of all these people, but rather it is a day to remember that those men died to give us the chance to choose what kind of leaders we want.
One of the most somber places that I can remember walking, alongside my dad, was a place that was so different from any of the other places was through the national cemetery at what would be Andersonville Prison National Cemetery. I have learned since I was there, that the men were often put in mass graves. They dug one long trench, and then they laid the bodies of the men who had died in the prison barracks side by side, trying their best to make sure that they identified all of the soldiers, but there were those they were not able to identify.
The images of the prison, they are something that one would not easily forget. But that was the thing, they were some of the first photos that I had ever been exposed to when it came to Civil War photography. The fact that in this prison that was only supposed to house a few thousand men, it at the end was holding nearly 40,000 men at its peak.
While there were those in the prison who had a different reason for why they were there, regardless of the aims of the federal government had in mind, you might find those who believed they were there simply to preserve the union, it is one of the many things that we need to understand, regardless of what they thought for themselves, we need to understand that there were always competing ideas. I remember a famous story, and it is well documented, that Lincoln when interviewed after the 1860 election, was asked whether he was going to end slavery, and he famously replied that if he could preserve the union without messing with slavery that he would, and if he thought that he could preserve the union and get rid of slavery he would do that. And the whole point of the statement came back to that he had no real intention to end slavery if that was the best. In the end, every United States President, instead of studying the documents of world leaders might consider reading the words of the former presidents. Those who had gone on before.
The images above, these are what the walls of the Prison Barracks at Andersonville Prison. But that is the thing, when you have all the time in the world to contemplate what your fate was likely to be, you would have asked if you were being used as a pawn in some awful version of chess. The men who were in the prisons across the south after 1862, they were going to be staying there and suffering. In 1862 the US government with Lincoln heading the charge chose to refuse to exchange prisoners. By 1863 there was a food shortage in the South. The Confederate government was not able to keep enough people in place to work the farms and plantations. The need for men at home to work in the fields was high, and Lincoln was aware of this.
And in the midst of all of Lincoln’s knowing, he knew that there was no way that the Confederate States of America was going to be able to support not only their own troops and the soldiers of the Union, they would also not be able to feed the women and children that were all over the South. This was going to be a way for the Lincoln Administration to push a more extreme policy to bring about the end of the war. Do you think that it was popular with anyone who had families that were hoping for the prisoner exchange, probably not.
We as Americans always have this idea that the people who do not agree with us, that they are wrong, and those who are of differing faiths, think that the other side is wrong as well. The thing is, this nation was borne on the shoulders of disagreement. When you look at the US Constitution, you must understand that even the ratification of the document was fraught with problems. The men who wrote the Constitution that we know, they knew that they were not going to get everyone’s support. There were those who wanted to keep the Articles of Confederation in place, it was the Articles that had given them a rough model for what they would eventually create. But that is the thing, there are those out there who disagreed with the idea of creating a federal government, why? Because they had just left a government that was trying to control them. There were those who wanted to keep the independent nation state setup that they have.
I know that when I started this, that I started by telling you, that the opinions matter. It is not that I want to silence the people who have an opinion other than my own. What I would say that I really want, and that is the thing, I want to feel free to have my opinion. While I could lecture many people about how they need to let other opinions stand, believe me, the history of our nation was built on it. In this post my task was clear, it was coming before all of you, and saying that there is no United States without differences of opinion.
As we stand here on this Memorial Day weekend, we see decorated graves of soldiers all over the United States, as well as in France and in the Pacific, and we need to know that they did not all have the same opinion when it came to politics. They can’t even all agree on which branch of the military is the best one, but that is the thing, there are those who are wrapped up in these ideas that we all need to agree, that we all need to be able to recognize this nation is a better place because we are able to have a different opinion.
I do not often think that people have to agree with me, but over the past few months I have watched as this idea, the fact that we have different things that are important to us, I have watched as a late night comedian was canceled, and the whole reason was that there were so many people who were not happy about the jokes he was making. What I would argue is that, if you take yourself so seriously that you can never laugh at the absurdity of your stance, I can assure you, that is the only reason that I can see to shut down a comedian. I look back on an event where so many people yelled and screamed the idea that his actions were extreme, and that he should be barred from re-entering the system for some time to come. Let us pick apart this event, and maybe we can all see that things are not always as they seem.
A few years ago a comedian made a joke, as he stood on stage. As he went through the joke, he offended a man who was sitting not that far into the crowd. The man in the crowd got up, walked up to the comedian and slapped him. If you did not know, the comedian was Chris Rock, and the man who did not take the joke was Will Smith. For weeks people weighed in on this idea, that it was just a joke, that if one person took his wife’s pride and such so seriously then he should not be allowed to go back to the award ceremony. But it seems that it was not long after that we have a man who has such a delicate ego, that if someone makes a joke, he can’t seem to let it go. Well, is that not the exact same thing? Be that as it may, it brought about the comedian losing his platform, the platform he was using to help people find humor in the things that are taking place around us.
I am not endorsing any one opinion here, but rather I am saying that the history of this nation, and the local history of these United States, they are built on the idea of freedom of opinion, but that is not what the Bill of Rights calls itself. No, it is the fact that we need to view the freedoms we have through the above lens, and be thankful that we still have a free nation, though it be a still fragile experiment. We must not forget that.
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