Landing on the moon, the invention of the automobile, the day that the Wright brothers first took flight. These were all amazing moments in history. Other amazing moments, I have lived through. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the election of our first African American President, Barack Obama.
And then, of course, there are the times we all wish we could erase. September 11, 2001, the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King top the list. Of course, wishing we could roll back the hands of time is almost foolish, because there is no going back. But we can remember, and we can record history and try to learn from it.
These days, I hear a lot of people say that we need to take our country back. I don't know what they mean by that, because we still have our country. Is it everything we want it to be? Probably so. People who say that we've somehow lost the nation to one group or another live in a fog.
We live in a nation that holds its elected officials accountable for their actions through, well, elections. And we've been known to prosecute a crooked politician or two when the situation called for it. We also have the ability to debate in this great nation. We can dissent if we don't like something, and as long as we don't act violently toward others, and we aren't threatening our fellow citizens, the government leaves us alone.
That said, I'm grateful to be an American. We have a history that, like other nations that were born and developed over time, has a dark chapter or two. We owned slaves in this country. No matter what, that will always be a fact. But, we also righted that wrong. 140, 414 Union soldiers fought to help right that wrong. In addition to that, 224, 586 others lost their lives on the Union side of the fight.
I won't go into the particulars of what caused the civil war to break out. There were many factors, including excise taxes and secessionist sentiments across the South. But slavery was the driving force behind all of that, and this nation went through the fire and came out stronger and better because we had that war.
Living in Virginia, where the capital of the Confederacy was located, I'm exposed to some interesting arguments about the merits of each side. Many people in this area are direct decedents of civil war veterans, and some people living today have very vivid memories of talking to and growing up around some of those veterans.
My only link to these incredible people are the civil war trails and battlefields that line the geography of this region. I have the privilege of living less than a quarter of a mile from one of the sites that saw heavy fighting, and the trails that I walk are littered with earthen fortifications used by Union and Confederate troops in the heat of battle. Sometimes, when it's early in the morning, I swear I can hear the soldiers running through the woods, taking cover and firing their rifles. It's truly haunting.
I snapped some pictures, but there are far too many for me to upload here. So I'll upload a few of my favorites here, and post a link to the gallery that contains the rest.
Civil War Battlefield at Newport News Park
