Well, here we are this morning after a tough news week and starting what appears to be another one. We started this morning with another fascinating chapter in our nation’s metamorphosis. We liked the way things were and spent more than a quarter century in service to its preservation against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
You know the last two words in that oath were more recent additions to the document , dating back to the conclusion of America’s Civil War in 1865. In that regard, it was an assurance that insurrection would not be permitted against the central Government by the residents of the various component states. We thought that matter was concluded long ago. So long, in fact, that a grand monument to reconciliation was erected over here on our side of the Big River. Someone decided it would be a good idea to rip it down this year.
The bronze statue atop the monument was designed by American sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel and was unveiled in 1914. It depicts the figure of a heroic woman atop a 32-foot-tall marble pedestal. It is surrounded by the graves of those who fought. The figure is wearing a crown adorned with olive leaves, holding a laurel wreath, a plow stock and a pruning hook below, according to the Army that manages the cemetery these days. A Biblical inscription at the base of the Statue reads- or used to read- “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks.”
The monument was erected in time to greet the onset of what was once called “The Great War.” There is another one in progress at the moment, though it does not have a name or a number associated with it. The inscription on the former monument was selected from a Christian document while participants in the struggle were alive. The last of them breathing did so in our living memory back in and there are reports from the Veterans Administration that the last pension from that war a century and a half ago was paid to a 90-year-old North Carolina lady named Irene Triplett. She received a check each month for $73.13.
She was the daughter of a man named Mose Triplett, who fathered her when he was in his eighties and his second wife was only 34. The last two soldiers who had fought passed away in the 1950s when they both had achieved the century mark in their lives. Some of us recall hearing the news when we were kids, and we have the realization we may have the same experience in our dotage for the vets who participated in World War II.
You have to forgive us for some confusion on this matter, since like everything else these days it seems a little crazy. When the Arlington statue was erected, the two soldiers still had four decades of life coursing in their veins. There were many citizens living then whose lives had been touched by the horrors of one of our species first attempts at industrial-scale warfare. The fifty years that had passed since the fighting of that war ceased enabled sufficient time to beat things from one purpose to another.
And back again.
And apparently we have had enough time to beat the pruning shears back into spears. There is a significant effort being expended these days to erase the memories of those who lost that war. Some of us had ancestors in the Union forces and some in the other one that must be forgotten. Some of us had both.
The better part of a million people died in that war, most in uniform but also tens of thousands of civilians across the entirety of what was then the dis-united States. Last we heard about the status that particular monument just down the road had a particular resonance, since some of us are eligible to rest there for the rest of eternity. Or fifty years until they decide to dig us up for some important cultural reason none of us alive have ever heard.
As with much that we hear on the News, it is just a function of our present inventing a new future over which we have n control. Our founding documents chartered the most successful constitutional republic in human history. It has been a pretty good run, but there are indications that it may be coming to an end, like the Reconciliation Memorial whose bronze pieces now rest in a dark warehouse. They are letting the marble remain, for now, since there are graves of the defeated around a monument to joint sacrifice.
It gives us some time to beat our tools from one form into another, you know?
We were going to explore the changes to the founding documents this morning. The Founders recognized that changes in circumstance might require modification. There is a process defined in the Constitution for how things might be altered as times required. It was intended to be rigorous, since those people held the principals contained in the document were considered to come from some Almighty source.
Accordingly, we have developed the technology to avoid it. The young people who drafted the document required a specific list of the things prohibited to our government in order to pass. They wanted to be sure it was plain and clear to anyone who read the words on the parchment. We were going to talk about the matters contained in the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 8th and 10th Amendments, and their unofficial repeal.
we did not consider the 3rd to be a matter of concern since we expelled the King, but everything is a little uncertain these days.
You will excuse us for brevity this morning. We are supposed to go beat some agricultural implements from one purpose to another. We have not been told what that is yet, but we have been assured that when we need to know, they will instruct us.
Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com