The Least Excuse

Heather Cox Richardson provides a real service, in her daily newsletter, by giving us context in which to understand (as much as it can be understood) the times we are suddenly living in.  Her bulletins are sometimes descriptions of the previous days events, and sometimes a journey through the particular part of history which will help us understand (caveat as above) those events and the people who make them happen.

Today she helped us understand how the Trump Administration is just the temporary end of a bright line that extends through American history from the Southern politics of slavery before the Civil War, through the Army of the Confederacy, Jim Crow, Klu Klux Klan, Nazi Germany, Reagan's "welfare queen" scam, Romney's "takers," to the January 6 insurrectionists who tied it all together by flying the Confederate battle flag in the US Capitol.  Her point throughout the journey was that these were all groups of Americans who banded together to advance their belief that some people were just better than others, more deserving, higher functioning and superior.  

Do you feel it?  Do you understand, now, what it's like to be the underclass, the second class, the undeserving, the inferior?  That's a big part of that dreadful, hollow, sickly feeling in the pit of our stomachs that has been there since January (or, for some of us, since 2015).  We are being bested by a bully.

I was struck by the words of Gen. U. S. Grant, with which Richardson ended her bulletin, who wrote late in life about his feelings on the day of Lee's surrender (160 years ago today):

“What General Lee's feelings were I do not know,” Grant wrote. “[M]y own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter [asking to surrender], were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

"One of the worst for which a people ever fought."  We are again in the throes of the same worst cause.  And not a valiant opponent in sight, or even one who "suffered so much" for that cause.