Wither the demons of our first civil war?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Feb. 22, 2025 – The understanding that good and evil are polarities of personality with equal distribution throughout the human race, as are intelligence and ignorance, is a prerequisite to mature adulthood.
When that understanding is coupled to willful determination to do good and to pursue intelligence, then necessary and sufficient qualifications for citizenship in a democratic-republic have been met.
However long it took for protestant puritanism to gestate and flower in England before it reached its evil apogee in New England, is a timeline that rhymes with the timeline of Anglo-African slavery, which ended when Abraham Lincoln usurped legislative and judicial power to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.
mistake of Christian forgiveness and hopefulness
In what is most kindly described as a mistake of Christian forgiveness and hopefulness, the Confederacy, which had been organized to preserve chattel slavery, was allowed to conserve and evangelize its errant rationalizations, after it had been defeated on the battleground, after it had wasted a million lives.
Facts on the ground today seem to indicate that the victorious Union’s absence of malice, coupled with an abundance of charity, has allowed the foundational ignorance of the Confederacy to spread and metastasize throughout the nation. Any measurement of the distance between good and evil, between ignorance and intelligence, will show that America is very near each wrong pole.
The nation that twice during the last century was found to be indispensable to the continued advance of human civilization, has since become as ossified and monomaniacal as a monarchy under the divine right of kings.
It seems that there simply are not enough Americans mature enough to govern themselves. Far too many people are content to believe what they hope is true rather than study enough human nature to learn that frauds and liars behave with the same consistency that governs leopards and snakes.