Or we can keep fighting it for another four years –

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

GETTYSBURG, Pa. — The election of 2020 is one week away and I’m driving up Highway 15 toward Gettysburg thinking about the Civil War we still seem to be fighting 155 years after the bloody war ended in 1865.

While 51,000 Americans died in the Battle of Gettysburg, 28,000 Confederate troops and 23,000 on the Union side in what historians call the bloodiest battle of the war, those numbers have now been dwarfed by the 230,000 people in the United States who have died from COVID.

That is until you consider that the official death toll from the four year war was close to 700,000 casualties.

More than 8 million Americans have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, while more than 470,000 were wounded in action in the War Between the States.

The million dollar question is: Why can’t we come together as a country and a people to acknowledge the truth about the danger we face from this virus, this global pandemic? There is no reason to fight each other about this, but we are, because of the partisan divide and the exploitation of the issue by certain politicians.

I’m afraid the answer to that has its roots in the remnants of the divisions in American attitudes about the Civil War. It’s true, and I can prove it. Listen up.

Demographically, 2020 was supposed to be the year the American electorate moved past race as a defining political issue. The diversity of our country is growing, so white Christians without a college education are no longer the majority they once were.

It hasn’t happened yet because one political party and its candidate for president still think they can use this issue to divide Americans and fool them into voting a certain way, just like the plantation owners who got poor white boys from places like Alabama and North Carolina to take up arms to fight for the continuation of slavery.

It was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight, you may recall the catch phrase, and we are still fighting it, with the poor people losing again.

It doesn’t take a team of scientists to figure out that the throngs of white, working class people mostly from rural areas who are flying Trump flags are Confederate sympathizers who are more likely to fly the Confederate battle flag than the Stars and Stripes, although some do both in another bit of confusing iconography.

Why is this and how is it even possible in this new millennium? Aliens from other habitable planets in the universe must be scratching their heads.

A Trump Parade

On the way back north from Washington, D.C. this week, I took a detour through Harpers Ferry, West Virginia and ended up behind a parade of pickup trucks flying Trump flags, which for some reason are blue and not red. Oh the contradictions in our political symbolism that contribute to public confusion. In Shepherdstown, on the other hand, on the border with Maryland, the entire downtown was plastered with Biden signs.

Gettysburg

On Tuesday, when I arrived in Gettysburg and realized the national military park visitors center was closed, I decided to check out the town. Along Baltimore Pike and Steinwehr Avenue, there are blocks and blocks of touristy gift shops and restaurants, all designed to capitalize on the remaining interest in the history of the Civil War. But here’s the thing.

Most of the people who come here are not that interested in the great American President Abraham Lincoln or the winning general who later became president himself, Ulysses S. Grant. They are far more interested in the losing Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

How did this happen and why?

Most of the hokey memorabilia they sell is not Union blue. It is Confederate red and white. Confederate flags, coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, car tags, T-shirts, hoodies, sun glasses and yes shot glasses, some with protruding tits in Confederate flag bikini tops. Do people really buy this crap? Apparently so.

There are a few pictures of Lincoln and his 10 gallon hat. But there are far more of Lee with his gray beard and dress uniform.

And yes, there are Trump flags and MAGA caps of all kinds for sale, probably the main item propping up the town’s sales tax revenues in the suffering economy.

Travel and tourism took a big hit back in the spring when the coronavirus first became a national crisis. It is creeping back up now, thanks mainly to the growing RV community. People have realized that you can still get out of the house and into the great American outdoors and travel, as long as you wear a mask and remain socially distant from other people as much as possible.

The shop owners and waitresses were mostly wearing masks, although some seemed to be doing so reluctantly, only because of the political divide. It’s a mystery why any politician would be so cavalier as to make fun of people who only want to keep their friends and family safe, except when you realize that the only way a con man like Donald Trump could ever be elected president is to divide people along these lines.

If you can convince the under-educated part of the electorate that you can’t have a clean environment and a healthy economy too, you can get some votes. If you tell them that peaceful protesters of color are responsible for the violence of the radical neo-Nazi right, you can get some votes. If you tell them that wearing a mask is for pussy Democrats, you can get some votes.

We will find out the week of Tuesday, Nov. 3, if you can get more votes by keeping people at risk and divided, or by trying to bring people together to keep us all safe like Joe Biden is campaigning to try to do.

Oh, but that’s so boring, right Trump fans? Is it really so exciting to believe and share dangerous, fake news and call factual news fake?

It may look like fun to jump a motor cycle over the Grand Canyon. But how many people would actually try it?

It seems to me our real task going forward in the press and media is how to stamp out and put down this Confederate mindset once and for all. Maybe when Rush Limbaugh dies of lung cancer and Trump loses and the ratings of Fox News start to tank, we can get back to reporting the facts without fear or favor and get people to pay attention.

Think about this. Grant wanted unconditional surrender by the South. Lincoln let Lee and Jefferson Davis and company off the hangman’s noose. Maybe they should have been hanged as traitors, not celebrated with monuments and statues. Perhaps that was our historical mistake.

We have begun to remedy this by tearing down those monuments and statues. But in the process, we have only heightened the partisan divide to fight this war for the hearts and minds of Americans one more time.

The only solution I see is for Democrats, women, African Americans and anyone interested is preserving American democracy and saving the country from dying of COVID to vote like crazy on Tuesday and send Trump and his idiotic followers back to the farm. They will be pissed off for a little while and some people may yet get hurt. They will try to suppress the votes at the polls and the U.S. Post Office. They may even sue in federal court and try to get the conservative Supreme Court to keep Trump in power.

If it is a clear landslide, however, they won’t be able to do that. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the deep state in D.C., Maryland and Virginia won’t let that happen. There will be a transfer of power, whether Trump and his followers favor a “peaceful” transfer or not. If we have to arrest Trump to get him out of the White House, let it be done.

When the Democrats start running the federal government again and the scientists are re-hired, instead of just tearing it down on TeeVee and Twitter, by Spring we may be able to bring back some semblance of normalcy. That is our only hope.

Then we must begin to deal with climate change for real, or it may be too late to save human life on planet Earth for much longer.

With all that we know about media effects on public opinion and how to conduct marketing, why can’t somebody make it seem like fun for people to work together altruistically to save ourselves? Is being selfish and believing lies really that much more fun?

Come on people. Let’s get it together.

Maybe someone should create a fun game app to show how this could work, instead of another war game where the fun comes from gunning down other people. I mean ask anyone who has ever killed another human being in a war. Taking human life is not fun. It scars you for life.

Saving lives, on the other hand, should be far more rewarding. Our challenge is making that seem as fun and exciting as fighting a war.

Our task: How do we explain this to the masses going forward? Why does this have to be so hard?

Lincoln

Are you ever haunted by lines from movies?

As I drove around the battlefields of Gettysburg, I kept thinking of a scene from the film “Lincoln” in which the president, played by Daniel Day Lewis, explains why it was time to pass the 13th Amendment to the Constitution to end slavery. At one point in arguing with his divided cabinet, the president slams his fist down on the table and explains why that was the time to bring it up, to settle the fate of slavery “for all coming time!”

Daniel-Day Lewis as Abraham Lincoln: An Important Story for All Time

Can we now settle this question of race for all coming time on Tuesday? Or will we be forced to keep fighting about it for another four years? Only you, the people, can decide.

___

If you support truth in reporting with no paywall, and fearless writing with no popup ads or sponsored content, consider making a contribution today with GoFundMe or Patreon or PayPal.