NOTHING NEW TO AMERICA

 A short note tonight, perhaps an optimistic one, for our American society. I just finished the first volume of Hay and Nicolay's biography of Abraham Lincoln. They were secretaries to him during his time in the White House, and Hay later came back as the Secretary of State for McKinley, so these two men actually knew and worked with Lincoln, as opposed to how many biographers on the subject? I read it to learn more about Lincoln, but it had the side effect of teaching me about the events leading up to the Civil War.

What I want to bring to your attention, though, is the part of this volume that deals with how Kansas got its start. I really, really recommend reading at least this part to any American reading this. I understand that it's not going to be pleasant for most. History books rarely are. But I think it offers us a little bit of sunshine on a rainy, say, four years.

All the political chaos we're going through right now? It doesn't hold a candle to what we went through in the 1850s. At the very least we don't have slavery in play right now. I mean, that could change at any moment, and I'm almost certain that the endgame for our corporate overlords is to bring slavery back, but this time to let it be colorblind. That's a story for another day, though.

We're supremely lucky that the federal government is terrible at being Nazis. They're more like the Hogan's Heroes version. Because if they were good at it, we'd be living in the days when people were literally murdering people on the opposite political aisle from them. Wholesale murder. Enough to make the practitioners serial killers.

Read this. It's mostly the last few chapters, but it will give you an idea of how horrendous things got before the Civil War, and it might give us some insight into avoiding the Civil War 2: War Harder. It will also tell you what they didn't teach you in elementary school: that slavery wasn't just a thing the South wanted to continue doing. They envisioned a slavery empire. Let the North have their dinky free states. The South wasn't going to stop at stealing Texas from the Mexicans. They wanted to steal Mexico from the Mexicans. And Central America. They wanted their slavery paradise to stretch all the way down to Tierra del Fuego in the cruelest example of Manifest Destiny imaginable.

And that's why evil has always been baked into our country. Sadism and inhumanity have always been lurking under our polite veneer of freedom. Freedom for me, not for thee.

Hell, if they'd taught us about Kansas in school, we might not even be in this fucking situation right now.

I beseech you to click that link. Read the whole thing. It's enlightening. But at the very least read about Kansas.

If this entices you, they write about how Lincoln, when he was a young man, despised people who spoke crudely in front of women. In one instance, he beat the daylights out of one such guy . . . and then rubbed dogshit in his eyes. They never told us about that on Presidents Day.