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Daniel Greenfield shares some important thoughts, and sobering on the origin, and future of Memorial Day
It has been over 150 years since our nation’s last civil war. Time enough has passed that we have come to associate the holiday once known as Decoration Day with the graves of soldiers fallen on other continents far from home.
It is important to honor our wartime dead. But Memorial Day has a powerful meaning that we have forgotten. It was the holiday that reunited our country after the Civil War. It began when Americans, from the North and the South, entered the cold gray stone fields of the dead, and decorated the graves of the fallen from the Grand Army of the Republic and the Confederacy with freshly cut flowers.
They followed no presidential order. They acted under no regulation. Instead the mothers and wives of men who would return home no more brought flowers to the graves of their fallen sons and husbands, and to the resting places of the young American men who might have slain them, who had been the enemy, but who still deserved honor and respect.
Those women, of the North and the South, brought America together.
In my nearly 50 years of studying the War Between the States. Nearly 50 years? I did start when I was 9, but still nearly 50 years? I am getting old my friends. Anyway, in my studies of the war, I am amazed at the brotherhood between the two sides after, and, in fact in many cases during the fighting. From privates, to the generals, acts of gallantry and sacrifice are legion.
At Appomattox, Lee and Grant saw the importance of what would happen after the surrender. Their focus on tactics, and strategies were quickly put aside in favor of reconciliation, and reunification. The two commanders did their best to begin the healing of the new America. Many others, of course, did their best as well. North and South began the long process of reuniting. And those ladies helped as best they could. Sadly though, that spirit is under a vicious, insidious campaign of division, hatred, and willful ignorance that will, if not curtailed, undo all that Grant, Lee, and so many others accomplished. Greenfield writes of what we are dealing with in 2022
Today a new breed of leftists gleefully tears down Confederate memorials. And it will not end with flags and statues. They will not be satisfied until the cemeteries that were once decorated have been desecrated. It is ominously fitting that the event which marked the end of one civil war now arrives to foreshadow the beginning of another war between brothers.
On a Memorial Day long ago, President Theodore Roosevelt praised the Union soldiers who “left us the right of brotherhood with the men in gray, who with such courage, and such devotion for what they deemed the right, fought against you.”
The Right of Brotherhood is what binds a nation. It cannot be imposed by force even when a war is won. It can only be won through mutual respect. Out of the brutality of the Civil War, came respect for the courage of those who fought and died on both sides. And once more, we called each other brothers.
Pay close attention to that first paragraph regarding these “new leftists”. Twenty-five years ago, I wrote quite often about the campaign to erase, and rewrite Confederate history. I predicted a time would come when no bands played “Dixie” or “The Bonnie Blue Flag” anymore. I predicted that a time would come when memorials, holidays, and remembrances of Confederate soldiers were no more. And yes, I predicted that, ultimately, all Confederate graves would be bulldozed and, thus erased.
Well, we might not have the bulldozers cranked up yet, but they moral idiots right here in Virginia are debating how best to “relocate” the remains of General A.P. Hill
RICHMOND, Va. — City leaders took a step forward Monday night in the process to remove the city’s last standing Confederate statue.
Richmond City Council members adopted a resolution that seeks court approval to remove the A.P. Hill monument on the Northside and relocate Hill’s remains.
Certainly General Hill will not be the only historical figure to be dug up by the new “tolerant” leftists. Some of those leftists, of course, have already erased beautiful monuments of Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jeb Stuart, President Jefferson Davis, and other memorial monuments to Confederate soldiers. A once beautiful road now has been cleansed, and sanitized. All that American history is all bad according to the leftists, so millions of dollars were spent to erase it. This is the price of “progressivism”.
Go read the rest of Greenfield’s piece. Make no mistake what is at stake. I wonder what the leftists will rename “Memorial Day”?
