We are not kidding about that matter. This isn’t the “start” of anything new. We just took a break for a few months of seasonal warmth. The warning about coastal flooding came with the passage of Tropical Storm Ophelia. It would have been more spectacular if her winds had been a little more forthright, like the other storm last week. That was Hurricane Lee, with a capital “H.” There are other periodic storms, often based on the passage of generations of Americans.

The National Weather Service made sure that we knew there was the possibility of coastal flooding, which we normally ignore since our condo is an aggregation of units perched on what was known during our Civil War as “The Arlington Line.”

That defensive fortification was never breached in the conflict. There were plenty of other ones and several cases in which trenches and earthen fortifications were breached in what was a horrendous storm of fighting in which six or seven hundred thousand mostly young men were killed. We don’t recall the exact number, since it does not include the civilian casualties. That would be the men, women and children who died because they got in the way of other things going on. What attracted attention this week was the Tropical Storm and the was the decision to remove the Arlington statue of the Confederate soldiers who perished somewhere else. It took several years for the dead to have advanced that far.

In fact, it was in the spirit of reconciliation that came fifty years after the combatant generation had passed from the scene that construction of the monument was begun. What is interesting to us, as veterans, is that the struggle has re-emerged as a matter of current affairs. There is an effort underway across the nation to eliminate the statues and memorials erected by the children of those who actually fought on the losing side.

This morning, we are apparently going to shut down the government next week. Some of us are in favor of that, since there is concern that something strange is going on across the river. We saw one of those graphic depicting the national debt and were mildly startled by what has happened to the National Debt. It took a couple hundred years for the people on the Hill to get to “seven,” counting as Trillions. We stand at $33 Trillion this morning with the analogous floods coming in.

It is an extraordinary process. We think that “Modern Monetary Theory” is the little bit of intellectual falsehood that justifies taking leave of our senses. In it’s way, it is more insidious than ripping down monuments constructed in 1915 to honor the dead from six generations before that. The spirit was to heal the lingering wounds of war. The spirit this year appears to be to start it again.

The memory of that tragic event has largely passed from the scene these days. We recall the centennial of the end of the fighting. That was 1965, and the images of the Blue and the Gray didn’t have the emotion, and both sides then received their honors, though muted by time. Since we actually remember that event as something real, this burst of emotion more than fifty years after the Centennial of the end of the war is a curious thing.

Apparently, the evils of chattel slavery are no longer taught in the schools, or if they are, it is in an incorrect manner. We think it is impractical to dig up any Confederates for legal retributions. They would be pretty quiet in the witness box, you know? We had thought those issues were as dead as all the people who had been affected, which would be 100%.

We do not intend to take part on the renewed struggle, since this burst of symbolic destruction is not about that war but rather about another. The images flooding from the Flatscreen this morning feature scenes that closely resemble an invasion. Even that term fails to capture some of the drama. There are tens of thousands- make that hundreds of thousands- who have crossed what used to be known as a border that marked the boundaries of America. Included in the millions are women and children under the control of he Cartels who are exploited in a manner that looks suspiciously like involuntary and compulsory labor.

Some of the people in favor of tearing up Arlington National Cemetery are also in favor of the relaxed immigration process. Back in Centennial days our parents took us to places like Gettysburg, It is now a pretty park, unlike the three days that made it famous. That is now 160 years ago this year. In addition to the armed conflict, this would be the 4th segment of the battle. 1863 was the kinetic fight. 1914 was when the memorial was unveiled. The Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s demonized some of the symbols of the defeated foe, and now we are embarked on another in 2023.

In part this is personal. We had considered spending eternity over at Arlington. It is a place of honor even for opponents in a bitter conflict. But some new conflict may include digging us up for something we do not yet recognize as inappropriate behavior. We think the family plot in rural Pennsylvania might be a good alternative. Those in the ground there would probably welcome us. We think that is probably true at Arlington, but of course that is government-owned land, and therefore subject to certain bouts of emotion unconnected to breaking news or current events.Tropical Storm Ophelia’s effects will be gone by tomorrow. The one over at Arlington, once General Lee’s plantation, is likely to go on for a while, and be backin a generation or two.

If none of that makes any sense, welcome to the 21st century. It looks like it is going to be entertaining!

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com