Last night when I got out of work Detroit ERUPTED! Cars started honking, people were shouting everywhere. It was an instant celebration! People
screamed OBAMA! There was shouting and a sense of Joy I had never felt in Detroit. I was hugged a few times by people that the day before wouldn't
have looked at me in disdain. What I saw last night in Detroit was beautiful.
But there is cause for worry. What I thought was interesting when I looked at the electoral map last night, is that I thought it looked quite
familiar.
2008 Election CNN Projections
Then it dawned on me.
1864 Civil War Divisions.
There obviously is cause to worry, there is obviously cause for celebration as well.
This is indeed an historic election. But I see history repeating itself. Remember also this similarity, Abraham Lincoln was a U.S. Representative.
(Yes I do understand that Lincoln was a GOP member, and the first Republican to be elected to the presidency)
What is interesting to me is that in 147 years, we now have come full circle and have arrived in the same spot we were when Lincoln took office.
With the emergence of the Republicans as the nation's first major sectional party by the mid-1850s, politics became the stage on which sectional
tensions were played out. Although much of the West – the focal point of sectional tensions – was unfit for cotton cultivation, Southern
secessionists read the political fallout as a sign that their power in national politics was rapidly weakening. Before, the slave system had been
buttressed to an extent by the Democratic Party, which was increasingly seen as representing a more pro-Southern position that unfairly permitted
Southerners to prevail in the nation's territories and to dominate national policy before the Civil War. But they suffered a significant reverse in
the electoral realignment of the mid-1850s. 1860 was a critical election that marked a stark change in existing patterns of party loyalties among
groups of voters; Abraham Lincoln's election was a watershed in the balance of power of competing national and parochial interests and
affiliations.
Source:
Wikipedia.com
Race may no longer divide us as much as it did in 1861, but new threats to our Union continue to do so. Our nation is in crisis, and it is my hope
that our new incumbent has the foresight to remember history, and not let it repeat itself.
I see old wounds torn open once again, fueled by old hatreds, and new issues. A stage has been set here people. What plays out on that stage is any
one's guess. But just look at what people today see as our most pertinent problems. And look to history and find those same problems shown in a
different light.
[edit on 11/5/2008 by whatukno]
