PHOTOS, PAGE 1

       Editor and prime reporter is Doug Terry, a veteran television and radio reporter in   Washington, DC, (details below)

THE MEANING OF HISTORY IN OUR LIVES

In truth, the past haunts us. The future is vague and never knowable, the past is always with us, though changing, evolving, turning like an imperfect hologram, an image in which we project our own idea of ourselves to distort what is known and unknown. We can not leave it alone, we can not let it rest.

The Civil War is yet again being played out in not so faint echos in this election season. 150 years later, a persistent minority of the population re-fights those battles in the name of the southern, honored dead, as if bending truth into lies anew would honor anyone, living or dead. We have settled a thousand public issues since that bloody time, but they keep coming back for renewal. The hold of mythology is stronger than fact. The present revolt, Tea Party other otherwise, is composed, in part, of left over ideas that a united nation needs to be disunited in the name of doing less.

I have learned one of the great tragedies during my time alive. It is this: the present is always killing what was as each generation rises anew. The tragic aspect is that each coming generation has no idea what they are killing, because they were not alive 30 or 40 years previous, so they sweep aside good with the bad to make their own time their own.

The period just before the Civil War and of Lincoln, Grant and others who managed to tape together a broken nation with the blood of hundreds of thousands of our fellow countrymen, is as strange and distant from our times as the planet Mars, save the fact that human nature reverberates in history's pages as if composed of immutable laws. What wonder it would have been to have shared even a few moments of this quieter, strange way of life. What wonder to have known something far better that is gone with the wind.

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