By Mike Magee
According to the historians of the Veterans Administration, the origin of the Fallen Day dates back to 1864 when three women from Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, joined the complaint to decorate the tombs of the family members who had died in the civil war. A year later, other people in the city joined and a year later, in 1866, women in Columbus, Mississippi, joined the event, in honor of the fallen confederate soldiers. That was 14 years after the publication of Uncle Tom de Harriet Beecher Stowe’s cabin In 1852.
In that first year it was published, Uncle Tom cabin He sold more than 300,000 copies. The author and critic Alfred Kazin called him “the most powerful and more durable work ever written about American slavery.” His prominence in the American lexicon speaks by Ithift, and his relevance with respect to goodness and governance, leadership by legislation, the roles of women in the creation of civil societies and the foundations of Christianity in the American dream of the American dream of the American dream of the American dream dream dream Dreamican Dreamican.
On page 2 of the preface, Harriet Beecher Stowe comments on “commemorating” human hatred and cruelty with the garbage of history. She writes: “It is a comfort for hope, like many of the sorrows and errors of the world have, from age to age, the leg lives down, so there will come a time when similar sketches will be valuable as monuments of what you have luminated.”
To this, we must answer today: “Not yet. There is work that remains.”
On the last page of his book, Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852 reflects (as in our modern situation), “this is an era of the world in which nations tremble and convulse. A powerful influence is abroad, arise and have and have and have and have and have and have and have and have and have and have and have.
For this, believers in human goodness and democracy must respond: “We will never be free, safe and healthy if chosen leaders promote policies, either here or abroad, who create our finest instincts, promote fear and trigger predation.”
The White House, until recently, has been largely a sacred and treasured sanctuary. In 2013, our president at that time, Barack Obama, was the seat of our former president, George Hw Bush and his family there to commemorate the 5000 prize of a “daily light point”, which the former president had launched to “honor people who demonstrate the transforming power of the service and who are promoting the significant and sustained impact through their daily actions and words that turn on other points of light.”
Here, in part, what President Obama said that day is: “… Given the humility that his life is defined, I suspect that it is more difficult for you to see something that is clear for everyone else around him, and that is how his sour vision and how the pattern pattern shines in pattern A is a shine of others, how your service love has been a similar love in the hearts of the hearts of here at home and around the world.
Just a year ago, just to be “grateful” publicly seemed enough. And the “active citizenship” as a member of this great nation was seen by many, by the majority, as a duty and an honor, equally to the point of sacrificing the life of one in defense of this nation.
That, after all, is what commemorates the day of the fallen. Action is required, as well as goodness and virtue for example and daily behavior.
We continually fight in the shadow of Uncle Tom’s cabin. We lack perfection, but we could certainly, and we should do better. Because being healthy in the United States, performing all our potential, being civilized, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “to fulfill the cause of freedom against slavery, you must … declaration of independence.”
Mike Magee MD is a regular medical historian and collaborator from THCB. Hey is the author of Blue Code: Inside the United States Medical Industrial Complex. (Grove/2020)