Cattle Drive, Patriotism and Prejudice
Lots of fun last weekend with family in the valley. We enjoyed some fresh tenderloin from a deer Amy’s brother harvested. Amy’s dad worked the whole time he was here, switching out light fixtures, building shelves, and fixing stuff around the house. He can do anything. He also cut some trees off of fence lines and helped add a load of firewood to our depleting pile. Usually I fill up the outdoor stove twice a day, but a couple cold and windy days this week required filling it up 3-4 times a day.
Amy delivered meat to Chilhowie on Monday. I spent a lot of time putting up electric fences in some stockpiled pasture on a leased farm down the road. We don’t want to give the cow herd the whole boundary all at once. There’s probably two months worth of winter forage for them if we manage it well. Yesterday Amy and the kids helped me drive almost 100 head about a mile down the road to their winter pasture. I get nervous on big round ups and cattle drives. All went well though. Other than that, same ole.
I did finish listening to “THE NEED TO BE WHOLE: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice” by Wendell Berry. About 20 hours of Wendell Berry thoughts. Brilliant man with a very thoughtful perspective. Berry, who is obviously not a defender of slavery or racial prejudices, is also not in favor of removing statues of Confederate soldiers such as Robert E. Lee. With an honest and forgiving reflection on the past, he addresses how the Civil War wasn’t a war simply fought for or against slavery. For some it was about slavery, but for others like Lee, they weren’t fighting to defend slavery as much as they were fighting to defend their homeland. Here are some quotes regarding the issue.
“I am taking the side of the first amendment, which I am no longer willing to entrust either to the so-called liberals or to the so-called conservatives. I want to be on the side of freedom. I want also to be an honest old man. I want to take the risks of my effort to be honest, just as if I were a young man trying to be honest. In my own judgement, I would be less honest, less human, and would have less hope of being useful if I agreed to or bowed to the strange principal of total hatred or total anger, or to its even stranger implication that we should condemn Lee absolutely, deny him any consideration or understanding as a figure of significance in our history…”
“The North was nationalist in so far as it fought for the nationalist idea of Union and for the conquest of territory. The South, on the contrary, was patriotic, in so far as its people conceived that they were fighting in defense of their native homelands and homes, where they wished to live and die. I see the difference, in short, as that between loyalty to a nation and loyalty to one’s home, family, and neighbors. A war of conquest and a war of defense. This, complicated as it is by the South’s defense of slavery as a part of its home defense, is a difference of enormous significance important, and I am glad not be be alone in thinking so. There is no assurance obviously that patriots will not serve a bad cause, but patriotism itself, as love of a home place and home country, is clearly a virtue. Though patriots obviously could support slavery, it is also obvious that slavery was not a result of patriotism.”
“So I will say that we can’t in good faith try to understand the Civil War without trying to understand Robert E. Lee. I am, after all, a fallible and struggling writer, intent upon pursuing the truth that finally only God can know. And Lee was not a statue or a symbol, let alone a demigod. He was an imperfect human being, something like me and something like his enemies, then and now.”
“People who think of the Civil War as a conflict purely of good against evil seem much inclined to think that after the war, the South should have recognized the justice of its defeat, repented of the sins of racism and slavery, accepted correction, and done the right thing by the free black people. This certainly is reasonable, but it is psychologically uncouth. It probably shows a deficiency of self-knowledge, for it overlooks some fundamentals of human nature. People who are at home in their own country do not like to be invaded. People do not like to be beaten, especially when their defeat involves the deaths of kin and friends. People do not like to be visited by outsiders who have come to improve their politics and correct their morals. If my neighbor became my sworn enemy because of my sinful behavior, wounded me severely, burnt my house and barns, drove off my livestock, stole my horses and crops, and then visited me on my sickbed with his Bible to make me as good as himself, I would not wish to give him the satisfaction. This we know as cussedness, a trait deplorable but common. For such deplorable reasons, reconstruction failed. Having lost the war, we might say, the South won reconstruction. It was a low, dishonorable victory…”
“But people who have self-knowledge will be brought sooner or later to some compassion for their enemies. We ask for justice for other people. For ourselves, if we know ourselves, we plead for mercy. And so with imagination, with sympathy, we may offer forgiveness.”
“The problem may have been public but it could be solved only by persons and communities.”
“But of course, we cannot be freed from history, even by ignorance of it. Our only power over it is to try to understand our old mistakes well enough to keep from making them again.”
“The sorest of the growing pains of ignorance may be the discovery that most partly bad people are partly good, and the the best of us are no more than partly good.”
Have a good week.
Will