Historical Picnicking

Hey friends!

This week I learned a new term: "Spring Break." That's the time when Katie doesn't have to go to classes for a whooooole week. (It also means that my other friends went back to their homes, and that's kind of sad, but I know that they all deserve a break.) Some people go to the beach for Spring Break; some people go camping; one of Katie's Facebook friends went to Canada! But, for Katie, apparently Spring Break means sleeping a lot and reading books. (She reads books really fast by the way. And she cries a lot while she reads them. It's a little scary at 3 o'clock in the morning.)

But today, Katie took me on an adventure with her mom and dad to a place called Janney Furnace in a little town called Ohatchee. We made friends with a puppy that we named Eustace, played on some rocks by the old furnace, toured a little museum with lots of old artifacts, and ate a picnic lunch.

But the thing I learned most about was the whole reason Janney Furnace is important: The Civil War. Katie told me to be careful talking about the Civil War in a blog, because some people have really strong opinions about it, but I just wanted to say a few things from the perspective of a bear who had never heard about it before today

I learned that the Civil War was fought between the North (the Union) and the South (the Confederacy). The South didn't want to be part of the United States anymore, so they "seceded." (Which is very different from "succeeding.") Katie said there were a lot of different reasons for the Civil War, like slavery and states' rights. She also said that history books sometimes don't tell you the whole story, because, as Winston Churchill said, "History is written by the victors." And in this case, I guess the North won.

But did they really?

I don't see how anyone could "win" a war against themselves. Katie said it was a "Pyrrhic victory," which means that they technically won, but it hurt them so much that they didn't really get any pride from it, so it's almost like they didn't win at all.

War just seems so scary. And the United States was less that 100 years old when the Civil War happened. 100 years old seems really old to me, but for countries it's not really old at all. We were still a baby country, and we almost destroyed ourselves with this war. That's not something I'm very proud of, but Katie says that a lot of people--in the North and the South--take the Civil War pretty seriously even today. She says people get angry about the Union "winning" and that people have even hurt each other over it, and that makes me sad.

The Civil War happened a long, long time ago, but we're still letting it divide us like it was still 1863. The South only has monuments to the Confederates who died, and the North only has monuments to the Union soldiers. In reality, lots of really good people died on both sides, and they probably didn't want to. They probably didn't want to leave their mommies and daddies and brothers and sisters and boyfriends and girlfriends and best friends and Trash Bears to go fight in a war. They might not have even known what they were fighting about. And they were probably really, really scared.

But no one really remembers that now.

People only remember that they were "damn Yankees" (sorry for the dirty word, Katie!) and "traitors." It's been 151 years since the Civil War ended, and we can't move past all the bad things we did to each other. We're stuck in it. And that's going to hurt us for 151 more years if we don't do something about it.

I think the sooner we stop thinking of each other as "Southerners" and "Northerners" and start thinking of each other as people who share a long and scary and broken and confusing history, we'll be happier. Or at least less bitter.


Maybe we should just all say we're sorry. Not for what our ancestors did, but for still pretending there's a war going on.

~Trash Bear (and Katie)~