On this just-past beautiful spring Sunday, my wife and I took our first visit to Duke Farms, the 2600 acre Jersey estate of the tobacco heiress, philanthropist and passionate horticulturalist Doris Duke. The foundation has just launched a free bike share program, and we spent three happy hours tooling around the meadows, wooded ridges, and huge network of man-made, landscaped lakes, all in perfect 60-degree sunshine.
At the heart of the estate is a house that was never built - preserved foundations at the top of a low bluff, with grand marble stairs leading down to a large circular meadow. At about 5:30 I took a short solo walk down the giant stairs, which felt like something out of Narnia, into the meadow, where you're flanked with grasses maybe two or three feet high. There, in the late afternoon sun, I flashed back to the battlefield at Antietam, which includes a cornfield you can traverse, and which we also visited on a still, sunny afternoon.
At Antietam you are at pains to imagine unspeakable carnage, and what struck me late in the afternoon sun there, and came back to me this past Sunday, was the sense of deep domestic peace in the ensuing 150 years, and what a rare blessing that is. I know that peace is marred by a further hundred years of peonage for African Americans in the south, and almost equally brutal discrimination in the north, and to this day by urban war zones, and a brutal criminal justice system, and a thousand other social ills and injustices. But human social well-being is relative, and the peace for most of us is real, and an accomplishment and a blessing.
I gather that a similar sense of felicity and festivity was in the air in Boston yesterday, until 2:50 p.m.:
Showing posts with label Antietam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Antietam. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Saturday, August 29, 2009
American exceptionalism, domestic peace edition
Jeffrey Goldberg recounts a joyful day of whale-watching off Cape Cod with Andrew Sullivan and spouse, and concludes:
The thought, which I associate most clearly with the bridge over Antietam Creek in the late afternoon of a cloudless summer day, was that there's been no such slaughter on these fields or on any other (Continental) U.S. soil --- with the anomalous, jarring exception of 9/11--since the Civil War ended. Not just the stillness of the moment but the domestic peace of a century and a half overlies those fields, the cemeteries on their peripheries, the bodies beneath a visitor's feet.
That's not to minimize the sacrifice and sufferings of Americans through a steady stream of foreign wars, or at home through segregation and discrimination, multigenerational poverty and inner city street violence. But here I am, 50, and I can count peers I've known who have died on the fingers of one hand. My wife and I have four healthy parents between us, and had seven grandparents who lived into their seventies or later. I don't think I've been to a dozen funerals in my life. Middle class Americans of my age and younger who have not served in the military are privileged like no generation anywhere has ever been privileged.
Provincetown -- and Iowa City, and South Orange, NJ, and Denver, CO -- do seem very far from the Middle East. If you're not deployed there. We should never forget how lucky we are, and what our forebears have accomplished. Or what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney - through their assault on our most basic liberties and Constitutional defenses against dictatorship -- imperiled.
And no, Andrew and I didn't discuss the Middle East. Provincetown seems very far from the Middle East.That chimes with a thought I had last week at Antietam and again at Gettysburg, at the end of a five-day progress up the Blue Ridge and through the Shenandoah valley and points North with my wife. Both battlefields are preserved (and signposted) to the extent that you can easily visualize men slaughtering each other at close range -- in the sunken road and across Antietam Creek at Antietam, from Little Round Top to Devil's Den at its foot at Gettysburg, not to say in the vast open space between the armies' respective ridges, Seminary and Cemetery, where Pickett's suicidal charge presaged the killing fields of World War I.
The thought, which I associate most clearly with the bridge over Antietam Creek in the late afternoon of a cloudless summer day, was that there's been no such slaughter on these fields or on any other (Continental) U.S. soil --- with the anomalous, jarring exception of 9/11--since the Civil War ended. Not just the stillness of the moment but the domestic peace of a century and a half overlies those fields, the cemeteries on their peripheries, the bodies beneath a visitor's feet.
That's not to minimize the sacrifice and sufferings of Americans through a steady stream of foreign wars, or at home through segregation and discrimination, multigenerational poverty and inner city street violence. But here I am, 50, and I can count peers I've known who have died on the fingers of one hand. My wife and I have four healthy parents between us, and had seven grandparents who lived into their seventies or later. I don't think I've been to a dozen funerals in my life. Middle class Americans of my age and younger who have not served in the military are privileged like no generation anywhere has ever been privileged.
Provincetown -- and Iowa City, and South Orange, NJ, and Denver, CO -- do seem very far from the Middle East. If you're not deployed there. We should never forget how lucky we are, and what our forebears have accomplished. Or what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney - through their assault on our most basic liberties and Constitutional defenses against dictatorship -- imperiled.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)