An awakening in the South

Possibly the greatest war story and certainly one of the oldest is the story of India’s awakened in a war between relatives. On the day of the great battle, Krishna counsels Arjuna. He tells him that victory and defeat are the same. He urges him to act, but not to reflect on the fruit of the action. He tells him to “seek detachment.” You must see with the same eye a cow, a sage, a dog and the man who eats the dog, he tells the young adept.

We have no such poets in our histories to chronicle Trafalgar, the Civil War, the war in Vietnam. None go so deep. But one might be instructive today in wake of the tragedy at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, S.C., and the subsequent outpouring of the heart manifesting in the removal of Confederate symbols not only in South Carolina, but throughout the South.

{mosads}Trafalgar was only a few hours at sea in 1805, but as President Nixon perceptively wrote, it gave England another hundred years of history. So the smaller incident in which Admiral Horatio Nelson’s historic sea battle turned the tide on the French Emperor Napoleon would have as vast a cultural impact as a long-fought and fateful string of battles like those in the Civil War, which would take 20,000 lives on a single, muggy, Virginia afternoon.

This past week will and should be fully included in the chronicles of America’s definitive moments, all of which from the beginning until now somehow return to the Civil War.

This week’s events brought the South to a new awakening. An old coat has come off. But this time it was Southern people took it off themselves, spontaneously, of their own accord; older white men and politicians who they themselves, some with long histories of racism, removed the symbols of the Confederacy with no coaxing from outsiders.

Nothing could be more important than these events to America’s future, begot by two who should from here on out be seen as original thinkers and leaders: Mitt Romney, whose tweet “Take down the #ConfederateFlag at the SC Capitol” is becoming iconic and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R), who demanded it be taken down. It changes everything and may even reform America from a North/South country to something else, something that cannot be seen today; something yet to be defined.

But one who is still considering his candidacy for president had a generally different response: Jim Webb, former Democratic senator from Virginia, former secretary of the Navy for President Reagan. Webb is the only possible candidate to the presidency in 2016 from either party to have experienced hard-fought and bloody combat. And he has written about it with greater profundity and passion than perhaps than any of his generation. (He just had a short fiction piece, “To Kill a Man,” published in Politico magazine.)

“The Confederate [b]attle [f]lag has wrongly been used for racist and other purposes in recent decades. It should not be used in any way as a political symbol that divides us,” Webb wrote in a Facebook post. “But we should also remember that honorable Americans fought on both sides in the Civil War, including slave holders in the Union Army from states such as Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware, and that many non-slave holders fought for the South.”

The events of the last week bring a sea change to America and particularly to the South, whose burden of history, as C. Vann Woodward has written, is greater than the rest of America’s but much like the history of the rest of the world. Perhaps we can make a fresh start now. Perhaps we have finally reached a plateau today and new lessons can be learned.

What I most liked about the story of Arjuna was the ending, where the prince, his battles won, his family and enemies all dead, climbs the mountain to heaven alone in his final journey and when he gets there, he finds only vast empty spaces. There is just one other person there, his cousin, who rushes to embrace him; the enemy with whom he has spent his life battling in warfare.

Webb approaches this in his comments as this is our story and our war as well. And these are the lessons we must learn from the war that begat us and still binds us together, whether we wish to be bound together or not.

Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.