Imagine...

John Lennon had a popular hit song that shares a title with this blog entry. His song asked folks to envision his idea of global utopia that is impossible to achieve (and not entirely desirable).

This is not about that. Instead, I'd like you to imagine the following two scenarios. One is a fact based story, and the other is quickly becoming one. First...

Imagine that you're a 30 year-old poor white farmer living in the south during 1860-1861. You have a large number of family & friends who live around you, and everyone works together to farm the land and eek out an existence. You're too poor to own slaves, and, unlike the slaves, you have no one else to keep a roof over your head, food on your table, or to care for you in any other way except yourself, your 2-months-pregnant wife, and 4 kids (ranging from ages 12 to 1.5).

One day you hear of a commotion in the town, and go out to learn that the President of the United States is raising up an Army to invade the recently seceded Southern states, one of which you live within! In order to protect your family & what very little property you own, you're being asked to sign up to fight in the military defense of your state.

Then, try to conceive of what it would have been like to have been on battlefield after battlefield, see your friends bleed to death, watch people get cut in half by the shot of a cannon, and all of the gruesome & gory aspects of war in the 1860s. 

After a few years of this, you receive a letter from your little wife at home... she says that they're getting by, but it's been hard since the Union troops took over town three months ago. They come and go through the homes of private citizens as they please, taking for themselves most of the good food anybody might have stored up. The baby girl born after going off to war is now a little more than two years old, but is sick, and the Union troops "requisitioned" what little medicine they found in the house; without it, all she's got is a prayer. Your other daughter, now almost 15, was out picking berries when the Union army rolled into town, and being the first pretty girl some had seen recently, was lured by a group of the men into a sexual assault. When she came home, your wife says she knew instantly what had happened, but dared not say a word about it for fear of their home being burned down as had happened to some of their neighbors. The 4 boys were doing well, but hard to keep in line at times, and she fears one will say the wrong thing to some Union soldier and face who knows what repercussions. Despite all of this, she begs you to fight on, not to desert, and not to get killed, and do all in your power to help Gen. Lee win this terrible war.

Finally, imagine journeying back home a few days after learning that General Lee had surrendered you. Defeated in war, and broken in heart, mind, body, & soul, you drag yourself back to the town you left to protect and hope to go back to some resemblance of normal life. As you travel you see nothing but war-torn land, and war-weary people. Finally you approach your home, and see three rock tombstones in the yard where none had been before, the names of your two daughters and oldest son hand-carved into the stones. You pass out from the combination of exhaustion & shock, and awake to learn that the baby had died shortly after you got your last letter, your oldest daughter killed herself over the shame of being raped by Union soldiers, and your oldest boy, aged 15, had been shot just days ago after stabbing one of the men who claimed to have violated his dead older sister.

This is what you went to war to stop... your dead children and traumatized wife & sons are the ones you went to war to protect... and this is the result of the Northern Army's invasion into the South in their conquest to keep the tariffs (taxes) on Southern businesses and ports pouring money into the U.S. treasury.

These are the men and the families for whom old veterans of the gray & their wives, widows, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, grandchildren, nieces & nephews, etc. raised up flags and monuments to honor. Selfishly too many have made these things about themselves or their post-war agendas, both the racists and the pseudo civil-rights groups alike, but these things have nothing to do with racism, slavery, Jim Crow, etc.  These monuments stand and flags fly in honor of honorable soldiers & their families. Only the hateful, the ignorant, and/or the intolerant people of the modern day think otherwise.

After thinking about that for a moment, then imagine the following scenario.

In 2016, a monument is erected on the courthouse lawn of Anytown, USA to honor the heroes of our nation who served in the first Gulf War.

Now imagine that 150 years later Anytown has become a predominantly Muslim community, and for 15 decades more & more people start believing that the Gulf War and Middle-East wars that followed in the early 2000s were about subjecting the Arab/Muslim world under the thumb of the U.S. simply for control of that region's oil.

How does the idea sit with you that monuments built to honor the sacrifices of men & women we currently know, love, and consider heroes for their military service might be vandalized, knocked down, or moved out of public sight because the people in Anytown, USA might consider our heroes to be evil & offensive in the year 2166?

That is exactly what is happening across the south with Confederate flags and monuments in the public square, which are essentially no different than tombstones. They were erected by people who lost loved ones... fathers, sons, husbands, uncles, nephews & cousins... many of them never making it back home.

They were paid for by donations from surviving veterans, survivors of the fallen, & friends, with some contributions being large, but most probably being very small; sometimes all folks could give were pennies at a time, and they did so while struggling to put food upon their tables.

They were erected in the most public of places to be sure that their brave loved-ones would never be forgotten.

This monument, and others like it, are incredible symbols of love, not hate.

Those who engage in, support, or contribute to the removal of such monuments are the one's filled with hate, and no better than those who would desecrate a gravesite. There is no good in such people.

These are just some thoughts I leave here for you to ponder as the media fills your mind with half-truths & total lies.

DEO VINDICE!
-Jonathan McCleese
Sergeant-at-Arms
Admiral Raphael Semmes Camp #1321 (Dearborn, MI)
Army of Tennessee, Sons of Confederate Veterans