The North thought John Stockton was a better PG than Chris Paul.

1,000,000 people died to expedite the inevitable. To people today this seems like a worthy sacrifice, but the 17 year old boy bleeding out in a hole in Antietam probably didn't spend his last living moments pondering the nobility of his gruesome end. It was a stupid war and never should have been fought. Providing rights to some at the cost of the lives of MANY (conscripted soldiers too, if you couldn't afford to get exempted you got drafted) is not something we should celebrate today, especially when slavery's days were clearly numbered already.

People in the south love celebrating the Civil...I mean...War of Northern Aggression. Shit, South Carolina was flying the Stars and Bars at the capitol until just recently.

Yes, when people lose their children in war they tend to want to memorialize them. Crazy concept.

The Civil War is actually a bit more recent than people realize. Civil War veterans were still alive, about the same age WW2 vets are now, when the US entered its modern era with a crystallized culture in the 1930's and 40's. There are even still children of Civil War veterans alive today, shit the last Civil War widow died in 2003! To these people, who the conflict affected very directly and in a way nobody from this era can possibly understand, those symbols are a coping mechanism for a lost generation.

A lot of people think Confederate soldiers dont deserve respect or recognition for their sacrifices because they are on the wrong side of history. I think that people who feel that way should spend a few months battling dysentery before suffering a 3 day artillery bombardment before they chose to comment on the character of men who fought and died in some of the worst ways imaginable.

The last Civil War widow died in 2003?

The last Civil War widow died in 2003?

Franklin Pierce has grandchildren that are still alive.

I think people who suffered directly from the war had mythologize it to make sense of the horrors they witnessed and family members they lost. That mythology had become ingrained in southern culture even as the Civil War generation and their children died off. I dont think I'd go so far as to call it a celebration, but even if it were I dont have a problem celebrating the sacrifices of brave men who died horrible deaths that no common person deserves.