Virginia’s Encomium to Esprit Revolutionaire
Richmond, Virginia, once the capital of Secession, is now like all “losers,” neglected and rejected.
Richmond does not even have a USPS central clearing center.
The Governor’s mansion on the grounds of the State Capitol building is home to a regional physician from a remote corner of the Virginia’s Peninsula with access to the mainland only by a bridge.
Governor Ralph Northam, an advocate for late term abortions, represents only one section of the State—the northern Virginia “Beltway” of communities where federal government workers reside and graze at the trough of high State and Federal taxes. Once discerning citizens chose to live in Virginia in order to avoid the District of Columbia’s high taxes. No longer. Virginia is now a “high tax” state dotted by memorials to Virginia’s illustrious past–one less today than last month.
A beautiful boulevard in Richmond where stately homes reside alongside monuments to deceased patriots was witness this week to removal of a monument to Robert E. Lee. The attempted erasure of General Lee from historical memory will endure only for about fifty years when curious Virginians reexamine the reasons General Lee fought on the side of Virginia and not on the side of the National government.
That act, equivalent to choosing aged bourbon over vodka, is what you did back then.
Unfortunately, Lee was the greatest military mind of his generation and his decision prolonged a civil war that gave us six hundred and fifty-five thousand battle casualties and transformed America into a secular nation state.
Now, even a monument to a memory of what once was, has been swept aside by revolutionary passions that Tocqueville called esprit revolutionaire.
Nothing good comes about when tradition is dismissed by revolutionary fervor and this seeming insignificant act by the Governor of Virginia should not be ignored.
Similarities to recent Spanish history are cause for serious concern.
