As We Mark The 150th Anniversary of the U.S. Civil War, We Celebrate Unity Domestically While We Promote Division Globally
By Danny Schechter, Author of The Crime Of Our Time.
One of America's greatest songs begins this way:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
Think of that image of "truth marching on" with "terrible swift swords' at the ready to reunify a divided nation, end a bitter secession and restore a union that had been torn asunder,
The author, Julia Ward Howe, was not just a patriot, but an activist, and an abolitionist who supported the North against the South to eradicate slavery and restore the union.
When President Obama speaks today, he always makes a point of invoking and punching up the name, or perhaps the memory, of "The UNITED States of America."
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
For a nation that has fought a war every twenty years, the American Civil War was the bloodiest in our history. For both sides, it became a holy cause, a crusade of righteous service to conflicting ideals in the name of God in the heavens.
The song conjured up a "trumpet that shall never call retreat."
