Even after absorbing the considerable wisdom of the analysis provided by the book What's the Matter with Kansas? and after factoring in my self-proclaimed status as both a Civil War buff and an Abraham Lincoln admirer, I knew I was missing something while trying to connect the dots of American history in my own mind. And then I saw a PBS rerun of Ken Burns' The Civil War. Specifically, I saw the episode wherein Shelby Foote [may he rest in peace--Ed.] explained why so many poor, landless, non-slave-owning whites fought for the Confederacy. In his sublimely subtle Southern drawl, Mr. Foote imagined a Confederate foot soldier talking to his Union counterpart: "Y'all came down here."
I had what can be described accurately only as a true "light-bulb" moment. The average Confederate couldn't care less about "Union," slavery, or any of the larger issues supposedly driving the war. He cared about feeling threatened, put-upon, literally invaded.
And so it occurs to me that even with all the technological and scientific and other advances humanity has made in the past 150 years, humans themselves have not changed--only their roles in society have. Land- and slave-owning Southern patricians have become corporate and banking CEOs (and other high-level managers); poor Confederate foot soldiers have become Tea Partiers; abolitionists have become political progressives . . . and we still have a tall, lanky, President from Illinois whose goals are larger and for the betterment of ALL of us, much more so than many of the country's citizens seem able to imagine.
OK, that last was a bit of a stretch, and said slightly tongue-in-cheek, but the general analogy holds. I don't know why I didn't consciously recognize it sooner. After all, I've been saying for decades that if we all had been alive 300 years ago, everyone on Wall Street would have been pirates.
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