Blurring the Lines
I recently came across a fascinating collection of letters dating from the Civil War era. Beginning about seven years before the war broke out, it introduces the reader to the various members of an upstanding and affectionate family whose day-to-day affairs we can follow through their very regular correspondence.
In a time when there were no phones, long, chatty letters abounded. Intelligent and well-written, even the most humdrum missive in which a mother asks her married son to pick up certain merchandise in his city and send it to her, is fraught with interest. But things really pick up as tensions between North and South heat up and the family nears the outbreak of the long-brewing war.
Coming from New York as I do, I’ve always viewed the issues leading up to the Civil War strictly from a Northerner’s point of view. In this book I was given a glimpse into a very different way of looking at things. The members of this letter-writing family—one of whom even served for a while as the mayor of Savannah—lived in Georgia and owned slaves, two words that make many people react with instinctive abhorrence. But the family’s slaves were treated as treasured members of their household. Their needs were cared for, down to buying the kind of slippers one female slave preferred. When they fell ill, the best doctors were sent for them. Many of the parents’ letters send along a friendly “howdy” to the family’s grown-up children, from the slaves who helped raise them.
When the Abolitionists in the North started making noises about abolishing slavery, the mainstay of the flourishing Southern plantations, the South came to the conclusion that, since the two halves of the country did not see eye to eye, they ought to simply split up. In fact, that’s what they did. The South seceded from the Union, to form its own country with its own way of doing things. They were a G-d-fearing group; the leader of the Confederacy even called for a day of prayer and fasting as the war began to take its toll. They only wanted to be left alone to live as they saw fit. It was the North that insisted on dragging the Southern states back into the Union, by way of a long, protracted and very bloody war.
The family that wrote these letters was made up of honest, hardworking contributors to society. Their letters are filled with references to a higher power and a desire to live lives of integrity and moral principle. Owning slaves, which was par for the course at the time, did not turn them into wicked or degenerate people. Nor did the desire to free the slaves mean that every Northerner held the patent on goodness. And let’s not even talk about the atrocities perpetrated upon the South after the war by the Reconstructionists, or the way the North, having won the war, left all those emancipated slaves dangling and at a loss.
In other words, though we are used to thinking of the South as “bad” and the North as “good,” there are two ways of looking at this picture. Both sides had ambitions and intentions that could be labeled “good.” Both also had ambitions and intentions that might fall into the category of “bad.” Both sides did valiant things, and both made mistakes. Both were human. But it takes the vantage point of time and distance to see that.
When we’re young, we tend to see everything in black-and-white monochrome. That’s why it’s so often the young who are at the forefront of movements for change. Inexperience makes them short-sighted enough to slap a “bad” label on something and then go out to battle on behalf of its elimination.
It takes the wisdom of a longer and more considered perspective to be able to properly weigh an issue, in all its shades of gray.
Introducing Nuance
It calls for maturity and long-term perspective to be able to take a nuanced view of things. To see that what one once believed to be of paramount importance was actually relatively trivial in the grand scheme of things—and vice versa.
How often do we hear of the super-wealthy entrepreneur who, on his death bed, profoundly regrets not spending more time with his children? Or the uber-successful businesswoman who sees, too late, that she ought to have made time in her life for a family. For each of them, for too long, power, ambition, and money were the things worth fighting for. Only much later do they realize they were pouring their energies into the wrong battle.
Sadly, we hear of long-estranged siblings who, after years of acrimony, suddenly realize how much they’ve lost by wasting all those years in hatred when they could have enjoyed them in happy affection. A civil war can wreak as much carnage in our personal lives as the big one did to the country it tore apart. At the time, though, this isn’t always easy to see.
At some point in our lives, hopefully, the battle lines become blurred. What once seemed worth fighting for begins to feel beside the point, while other values, earlier trampled on, take on new significance. Old slights and ambitions can begin to seem almost laughable when we realize how insistently they dragged us away from the things that actually have the power to make us happy.
We learn to recognize the true enemy and to reserve all our fighting spirit for that epic battle, instead of distracting ourselves with petty, imaginary foes that our insecure egos conjure up.
Epiphany
We don’t have to wait until we’re on our last legs to figure out what’s what. Admittedly, the passage of time is vital when it comes to taking the long view. But whatever age one may be, we can try to start taking a nuanced view of what once seemed unabashedly black and white. We can take the time to project ahead to the future consequences of an impending battle, and to question whether it’s really necessary. Certainly, these things should be considered before any psychic blood has been spilled in the cause.
If we’re lucky, at some point in our lives we have an epiphany. We hear about the once most popular girl in school, now grown up and afflicted with personal tzaros, which will help us exchange our long-standing envy for an attitude of compassion. We meet the talented and accomplished person we always wished we could be and discover that, inside, they are suffering, too. We find out that those we most resent are coping with demons of their own. We hear about the good deeds of people we don’t relate to and find ourselves wanting to learn from them.
And the invisible lines that have always seemed to be drawn between us and them suddenly become blurred, like a line in the sand after the footsteps of experience have shuffled through it. After that, it seems kind of silly to stand apart anymore.
At some point, if we live our lives mindfully, we’ll come to realize, not that we’re all in the same boat… but that each of us, ensconced in our small, individual boats, are all sailing on the same vast, limitless, and unknowable sea. And if that’s not a reason for solidarity and erasing battle lines, I don’t know what is!
