Americans have sanitized and commercialized our Civil War so much over the past 160 years, that I think many people think it is exactly the same as the reenactments, and are just tiny little skirmishes that end in everyone driving home at the end of the day after a good time.
A little too much like the tourists that went to view Bull Run as it was happening only to find out how south (pun?) it could all go.
> A little too much like the tourists that went to view Bull Run as it was happening... <
Yep. And a lot of that thinking persists today. Some of it is on the left. But unfortunately most of it is in the right. “Yeah, if they impeach Trump (or whatever), we’ll arm ourselves and march on Congress.”
Well, okay. And then maybe Pelosi and co. will just fold, and it will all be so glorious. Or maybe it will be an awful, bloody mess. In the latter case, would it still be worth it? Only an historian 20 years from now could answer that question.
My Dad told me about some of the awful results of those battles when taking me with him to the battlefields, such as the men screaming their heads off while their wounded limbs were being amputated by saws sans anesthetic. Then the limbs were tossed out the windows onto the ground below. Dad actually took me into one of the houses — a tourism site at Manassas Battlefield — where these gruesome surgeries were performed.
My great-great grandfather sold corndogs and funnel cakes to those tourists.