April is Slavery Entitlement Month in Virginia. So proclaimed by the Governor Ronald McDonald ? – Robert McDonnell there. Actually it is not about Slave Entitlement to the Plantation Owners who were traitors to the United States for something like four and one half years 1861-1865. It is Confederate History Month???
In line with some tourist magnet historic date in the next year or two, Virginia needs to save Civil War Battlefields that keep in the name of free market capitalism (bow your Head) becoming industrial parks and shopping malls. If you cannot make hallowed ground the battlefieds of that traitor’s war, then maybe you can Disney-fy reality about the horrors of a war that killed six hundred thousand Americans on both sides of that tragic disagreement.
The two previous Democratic governors had refused to issue the mostly symbolic proclamation honoring the soldiers who fought for the South in the Civil War. McDonnell (R) revived a practice started by Republican governor George Allen in 1997. McDonnell left out anti-slavery language that Allen's successor, James S. Gilmore III (R), had included in his proclamation. WASHINGTON POST
Honoring the soldiers who fought for the south? What about the soldiers that were guilty of war crimes. My great grandfather was a POW in a shithole of a POW camp in Virginia after he helped Sherman liberate Georgia. Oral history in my family speaks of starvation, beatings and torture. Are we honoring the men who did that Governor McDonnell?
No doubt both sides did that, the war crimes thing. They had to do that because Robert E. Lee turned down Lincoln’s offer of General the Armies of the North. Had Robert E. Lee been a man of conscience and taken that job, perhaps half a million Americans would not have died and the Civil War would have lasted less than a year. Instead he had to fight for southern honor, the approval of his country club, plantation slave owning peers.
His effigy above near his grave is spread out like that of a dead king in Westminster Abbey in London. Indeed his ambitions to be a king were dashed with the loss of the south. He was married to the step-great granddaughter of George Washington.
Washington was a true man of both honor and conscience who refused to become king or sieze power in his day. Washington also freed his slaves in his last will and testament. Washington saw the future and did not want to be judged on the wrong side of moral history.
Perhaps Lee’s imcompetant entitled blood royal line and role as head of the Southern Army is what made his family so dysfunctional. None of his four daughters married and ony two of his three sons had any children. But that is another story.
It was indeed fitting that Lincoln decided to bury the dead of that war in the front yard of Lee's Plantation, present day Arlington National Cemetery.
Woulda, coulda, shoulda month in Virginia. Virginia used to be for lovers. I will avoid it in any further travels through the south. I will wait to pee at the gas station in North Carolina.
Nostalgia for the wrong things, for delusional glory in the past is not a healthy thing. Enjoy Confederate Fantasy month in Virginia.
