Weekly Posting of the Conservative Cow Doctor

Keep It or Toss It

A decade back we restored our century-old, two-story barn to serve as a wedding venue for Tyler, my youngest. Step one was hauling off 100 years of junk. Dumping old water heaters and refrigerators was successful only because Dad’s arthritic knees kept him from retrieving treasures from the trailer and lugging them back into the loft. I may have inherited Dad’s collecting tendencies because a few years prior, I bought a scrap metal pile at Zeiler’s farm sale simply because I needed a bone pile. To curtail my hoarding habit, every spring I do force myself to thin the treasures behind my shop, but the fear of tossing a spring, piece of angle iron or pipe fitting I may need later causes me great angst. Somethings are worth saving so with that point let me step away from the dump trailer to explain why this is timely.

During the waning days of the Civil War, thousands of Union prisoners were hustled into makeshift POW camps across the Confederacy. Disease and exposure claimed so many in Charleston, South Carolina, that 257 Union soldiers were tossed into a mass grave behind the grandstands of the abandoned Charleston racetrack. This mass grave would have been known only to God were it not for 1,000 recently freed slaves who refused to let this stand. On May 1, 1865, these newest Americans helped the U.S. Colored Troops exhume the bodies and consecrate a proper burial site for the Union dead. Similar acts of honor and gratitude began popping up everywhere and three years later this motivated Union General John Logan to name May 30th as Decoration Day—a uniform day to honor America’s fallen soldiers. This later became Memorial Day. May 30th was chosen because no Civil War battle was tagged to the date. Decoration Day became a simple, solemn day of remembrance of those who sacrificed, and this bring me to my point.

Contrary to the rabid preaching’s of America haters, ours is not a racist nation and to demean her as such belittles the sacrifice of those who gave their lives that others might be free. No other nation killed 620,000 of its own citizens settling the debate whether one man had the right to rule another. Our United States did. Our American story is filled with events which demonstrate the innate goodness and colorblindness of the American spirit. We cannot let Marxist wannabes erase and rewrite history by tossing what makes America great into the dump trailer. We truly are all created equal.