Memorial Day

It used to be called Decoration Day, a day to decorate the graves of soldiers who died for The North (Yankees) during the US Civil War. After WWI, it became a day of remembrance for any US soldier, sailor, marine or airman who died during any war.

One of the things that anyone who wants to understand the United States of America needs to know ...is how the US Civil War distorted our political development.

Everywhere else on earth, other than the US, people tended to group together according to their shared interests ...then they would act politically to make sure that those interests got represented in their governments. Not so in the US.

Anywhere else on earth, if you were a person of property ...you grouped together with other persons of property and made sure that your government represented you well. The same with industrialists (people of not much property but with techno-knowledge that could bring much to their nations.) The same with workers (people with no property and not much chance to acquire it but who brought strong backs to do a job and could insist on a fair wage and fair treatment.)

Not so in the US.

After our civil war, we split along Union and Confederate lines, North and South ...and that split survives to an amazing extent even to this day ...and is one of the reasons that we yanquis are "different" from others.

Whenever planters in the North and South would begin to find common interest, whenever industrialists in both the North and South would begin to develop an agenda that would further their common goals, whenever wage-earning workers on one part of the Mason-Dixon line would begin to dialogue with their counterparts on the other side about how they could unite in common cause...

...something would always happen in US politics

...they would "wave the bloody shirt."

When the natural progression of people with interests that spread across North and South lines would begin to develop, a Northern politician would pick up a stick and place the bloodied shirt of a dead Union veteran on it and wave it to the crowd and say something along the lines of, "Are you going to dishonor the sacrifice of this brave Yankee soldier by making filthy commerce with those who put him in his grave?!?"

Southern politicians were just as skilled at the game. Instead of a blue shirt, a gray one was waved to incite the crowd "to vote the way you shot!"

Industry remained divided. However, commercial interests could (and can still!) be conducted without drawing too much attention to themselves. Still, the South remained largely outside the economic development experienced by the post-civil war North until more than a century later.

The common interests of workers became perverted. Labor organization, largely centered in the industrial North, was thwarted in the South, and later, even in the West.

Men and, later, women throughout the US, institutionalized the practice of voting against their interests ...no matter how essential they were to their prosperity and even their survival. It cut across class lines and still to this day affects the way we behave with each other.

Even the internal progress of the 20th century was an accident of "centrist" Republicans and "Dixiecrat" Democrats that gave the illusion of a broad center of political consensus. Ultimately, we could not reach across the divide caused by our civil war.

Eventually, the lines blurred so much that there became little economic difference between Birmingham and Indianapolis, Atlanta and Chicago, New Orleans and Detroit.

But the grand US tradition of siding along artificial political lines, instead of the sort of lines that unite groups everywhere else in the world, still exists to a great degree ...and knowing that is essential to anyone's understanding of why the US does not behave politically like Latin America or Europe or anywhere else in the world.