The World

I am watching the Ken Burns Civil War documentary on Netflix streaming. It makes you think.

This documentary has fascinated me completely any time I've watched it. I'm on Episode 3 now - Emancipation proclamation might arrive by the end of it? I'm not sure how far off it is.

Watching the lead-up to the War, "The Cause", secession, the beginning, Manassas, Shiloh this really grabs me: War is people killing one another. That is what it *is* right?

When it comes to the Civil War, before the first battles are fought, the men write that they are having the time of their lives. When they are learning to sleep in heavy dew while marching 25 miles and rubbing sticks together and whatnot, they feel more alive than ever.

Then they experience "the horrors of war" and they use this phrase "the horrors of war" because they know, as one must, that war is horrible, and this is the phrase used for it.

There are at least 12 reasons that this documentary is fascinating. But what gets me amazed early on is just war itself - we're at war now in a very very different way.

See.. I keep wanting to veer off in a hundred directions of comparison but I won't. What I'm trying to say is we still do this. We still have ideas all around and about war, and excitement by the meaning it could give dying, I think. But when we talk about it, if we talk about it, we let it, "War", become something else. It is people killing each other. It is "the horrors of war". Predictions for the civil war imagined it would be over very quickly. Well why would it be? Some things never change. When two sides fight against each other, killing, 'til one has to surrender and one must be called the victor, why would that ever end quickly and why would it be anything but horrifying bloodshed?

The Civil War also has you, or has me anyway, from the start because slavery was evil. Then you have people living in that world before telephones and so on. These people believed in God. So the stakes are so.... meaningful? I'm not doing so great at writing this.

I suppose I'm saying that the Civil War makes you think about Religion too. Makes you think about life and death and principles. And slavery. I'm not sure "we" could ever be done repairing for slavery if we wanted to and tried to. And the "we" is funny there because I'm an Eastern European Jew, but I'm also a white American... you see how I could go off in many directions here...? But you don't know why you were born you and not a slave, in America and not Bahrain, and so on. We'll never know that. We as in people. And I think also we, as in people, will never quite remember that to go to war is to court your death. That idea is just too exciting.

I could go on all day now about tragedy but I'm going to stop.

Lots of love,
Alexis