150 Years After It Began, part 2

By Zach Foster

Author of On the Confederate Flag

Continued from Part 1

What have we learned?  If anything, Americans have learned that no one wants a second civil war.  While Southern nationalism still exists throughout various regions of the country, it is almost exclusively based on philosophy and rhetoric, not on violent revolution.  Americans know that politics should never evolve into war.  Though our society has learned this lesson, it has succeeded only in applying it at home but not abroad.

While it would be desirable that all Americans (and all people) would treat each other lovingly and work together—even compromise—to solve problems, many have yet to grasp this philosophy.  It is encouraging that a shut down of the Federal government was recently avoided through a compromise—albeit a temporary one—between leaders of a Democratic Senate and a Republican House of Representatives.  This shows the spirit of cooperation and achievement between factions in a multi-party system.  Still, this kind of compromise and the spirit behind it both grow in American politics.  Neither side will budge on their aims and nothing gets done.  There is still animosity and enmity between political schools of thought.

On the far left of the political spectrum lies a group that has no patriotism or allegiance whatsoever to the country that gave them liberty.  This group has only a patriotism for one social class and would seek to destroy the others and ignore the rights (and existence) of the individual for the sake of “society”—for the “greater good.”  On the far right lie two groups.  One is fiercely patriotic to America but has made it clear that it will not tolerate any religion other than Christianity—contrary to what Christ actually preached in the gospels.  The other has no patriotism to this country—only to a particular allegedly superior race—and would seek to destroy all other races for the “greater good.”  All of the above mentioned groups present a danger both to American society and all of humanity, for any belief that tolerates nothing but one type of people and one set of beliefs, etched in stone for eternity, is a group whose motives will ultimately lay in overt oppression and genocide.

If there is any legacy of the American Civil War that the author would be proud to one day tell his children or grandchildren about—even if it takes another fifty or one hundred years—it would be that Americans learned to coincide peacefully with each other and with all people as brothers, children of God, and ultimately, human beings with only one world and one future for all to share.

END.