This morning while preparing for a school program on the Civil War, I had an epiphany…no it didn’t hurt, there was not loss of blood, I did not lose consciousness or see dead relatives, “on the other side”.. and as far as I know, the neighbors did not smell smoke. It was just one of those thoughts that pop up in my cross wired storyteller’s brain that are usually pretty “right on”. I have always joked that when I got to heaven I was going to give my slave owning ancestors a swift kick in the back side, …. for participating in something that could never have been worth the amount of suffering it has caused. William Bonner in Virginia owned land and slaves and when he moved thru Carolina and Georgia he brought them with him and so when my great, great grandfather rode his horse to war in 1861 he left his wife and children in Hickory Flat, Alabama to be “watched after” by his slaves…and this they did until the war ended. Although the family Bible of that time records a number of births and deaths among the human chattel, the slavery idea was not the idea of my bloodline. You see when Oglethorpe founded Savannah in there were to be “no slaves and no lawyers” but the insistence on the King of England to make Georgia (named for King George) a Royal Colony so it could use slave labor was not something that the colonists could ignore. The truth of the matter was that the gaining of slaves in Georgia was a matter of commerce and would provide more product to the “founder of the feast”….King George. And thus slavery in Georgia was born…not a few weeks before the Civil War and NOT because someone particularly wanted to hurt people of color…commerce (money) trumped it all. In fact for those that are “big time” history nerds you know that the North had many monetary interests in the question of slavery as did England and France who wavered on the sidelines before finally proclaiming their neutrality (which really meant they found another source for cotton). Today we find ourselves in the same boat (in regards to money)…we can at times be drawn into questionable moments and downright illegal activity because of the want of money. And it seems (at least in my life) that there always appears a group of folks to tell me how the questionable activity is really OK because everyone else is doing it. Today we have groups of people at the ready to dissect the Ten Commandments to at least water them down and at worst….ignore them entirely. Even today, the folks who benefitted from the Emancipation Proclamation have now sided with the group who enslaved them and “sold their birthright” for the coin of the realm. Last night I read a few of the doomsday post from die hard Georgia Bulldog fans lamenting the suspension of their Saturday hero (and possible Heisman Trophy candidate) Todd Gurley. The big complaint seemed to be that his punishment seemed more extreme than some other player from some other team…but my thought was….if you didn’t violate the rules you wouldn’t be subjected to any kind of suspension at all. So the epiphany is this… “doing the right thing without regard to financial gain is like swimming up from a deep murky pond to gulp the clean fresh air in the morning light”. I’ll see y’all on the off ramp.
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 11:42:58 +0000
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