It doesn’t surprise me that the month of July is named after Julius Caesar. After all he was born in this month. Back then they called it Quintilis. That meant it was the fifth month not the seventh. I don’t really know how they slipped January and February in because Mother Nature hasn’t changed the length of her year.
Nevertheless July has been a busy month for the United States. This is in both at the beginning and in the celebrations. Hot dog folks like July because I understand we consume over 155 million hot dogs. We did our part this year. Did you?
That’s enough about the calendar for now. I have been wondering what is going on in the world. I read a lot of History. They say those who don’t know history are bound to repeat it. It must be that many people must not read history because we sure seem to be repeating history over the years.
During the founding of our country I find there were a lot of folks who didn’t like the way things were going. Everybody seemed to like George Washington.
However, the next two guys were an enigma. John Adams, the second President. and Tom Jefferson, the third, fought like cats and dogs. They had two different ideas about what was the right way to run things. Adams wanted a strong central government. Jefferson wanted a more states’ rights, pastoral kind of way to run the place. That is a very general way to describe it but the history shows how nasty the fight was.
As erstwhile friends they ended up not speaking to each other for years after their time in office. Then fifty years after the Declaration they both died on the fourth of July 1826.
One of the big points of contention, slavery, continued to boil in the nation leading up to the Civil War. The real argument there seemed to be whether the new states would allow slavery. It was not settled.
Finally, around 1860 Lincoln got elected President. And the lid of the pot boiled off. Southern States started succeeding from the Union. Absolit1ionists wanted Slavery to be abolished. Lincoln wanted to preserve the Union or as he stated at Gettysburg “that this government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish” He did make the emancipation proclamation. But it was not taken out of the constitution till after the war was over. Even then the real question lingered. However, as one studies the history it becomes clear that all the battles were not on the battlefield. They had “copper heads”, fake news and all sorts of nasty struggles. The war stopped but it really wasn’t a final settlement.
And nowadays we have a very similar fight. The cries are over whose life counts, immigration, and who the good guys are and who the bad. However as I read between the lines all the fundamental arguments are history repeating itself.
