"Dying. And that's what these white boys been doing for three years, fool, dying by the thousands. Dying for you, boy. I know because I dug the graves."
--"Glory" the movie
Mad Dog has never much liked the expression "American exceptionalism," as if America is something unique over the 2,000 year history of nations on this planet, which have risen, fallen and blown away as dust in the wind. As if we Americans just so "special" like some pampered children of affluent parents.
But there is one way in which America may be unique. Mad Dog does not know enough world history to be sure, but if there is another country in the world's history which has fought it's most costly, devastating war to free an underclass, a slave class, Mad Dog would like to know.
And they fought not for economic reasons, not for conquest, but for a simple principle: that all men should be free, that no man should be thought to be the property of another man, that a human being cannot be property. If any other nation has fought a great civil war to free a class of underdogs, then Mad Dog would like to know it.
Oh, all the Lost Cause revanchists will try to tell you the Civil war was not about slavery (because they know they can't sell slavery as a good thing in the 20th century--although Margaret Mitchell tried in "Gone with the Wind,"--the way it was sold in the 19th century as the best thing for the slaves and for the naturally superior white race), and they'll tell you it was just an industrial North trying to subjugate an agrarian South, or that it was about any of a dozen things other than slavery.
Well, Mad Dog was not alive then, so he cannot be sure. He can only read history. But who writes the history, and for what purpose?
But Mad Dog believes a man who was alive then, who should know, and who summarized convincingly the cause of the war, Abraham Lincoln. In his Second Inaugural speech, with his assassin standing just a few yards behind him, visible in the photographs, Lincoln explained the cause of the war, and he said there was a "peculiar interest" not distributed evenly over the country, but concentrated in its southern parts, and that peculiar interest was the cause of the war. Of course, everyone knew then, and everyone should know now, what he was talking about: slavery. Nobody wanted the war, but as long as slavery existed, nobody could prevent it. "And the war came." Inexorably.
But not so inexorable: why should free White men in New Hampshire leave their farms and homes and jobs and families to go South to die at Antietam, Gettysburg and Shiloh? Walk through graveyards from Gilmanton to Hampton, and you'll see gravestones of men in their twenties who died between 1861 and 1865. Look at the bronzed plaques on Hampton town library and you'll see the names of men who served--and one of four died--in the regiment sent south.
In the movie "Glory," an old Union Negro soldier (Morgan Freeman) gets in the face of a young hothead Negro soldier (Denzel Washington) who has been raging about the discipline from his white officers and Freeman tells the younger man that rage has blinded him to the good men can do, that these white boys have been dying in the thousands to free him and all his race for three years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLisMDlb8IE
That is the simple, powerful, astonishing truth.
And now we have White people in Minnesota dying to protect their Black neighbors, and we have White high school students from Winnacunnet High School holding signs on the street across from the Old Salt, denouncing the murderers, denouncing ICE, protesting murder of people in far off Minnesota by people who have only one argument, and that argument is blood.
It's sort of amazing really. White Minnesotan men and women in the faces of a masked white army of hatred. (Our very own Whitewalkers.)
Do those Minnesotans even have a dog in the fight? Well, after the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, they apparently think they do, and even before that they thought they had a dog in the fight.
And what is that fight?
It's White men, armed to the teeth with assault rifles beating up and absconding with Black people, out of hate, out of racial animosity.
There can be no doubt those ICE and CBP agents are not there to defend the borders. They are there to imprison and remove Black people on the orders of a White President who pictures even a Black President as an unevolved ape.
These shock troops of Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino, and J.D. Vance and Trump are the army of hate, fighting for white supremacy, fighting to dominate and subjugate.
And White people, who could just walk by it all, and go home and watch TV and cook dinner and ignore it all are not doing that.
Not in Minnesota.
Not in Hampton, New Hampshire.
