Confronting Ignornace About Slavery And Southern Heritage -- Responding To Regressives

Greetings and Salutations, Y'all!

Its been quite a while since I've had the opportunity to do one of these Responding to Regressives pieces her on this blog.

Actually, the fact of the matter is I don't really do them very often because they tend to get a bit repetitive. Some pseudo-intellectual writes a really moronic piece trashing Confederate heritage or Southern identity, and I drop a few truth pipe bombs on their ignorance -- which usually tends to be the same tired anti-Southern heritage talking points packaged in different rhetoric, but amounting to the same thing.

This time is not really different, but I feel the need to respond to this one. Largely because it deals with the misconception of how the Southern of slavery is largely viewed by those who honor Soutehrn heritage as a whole, and Confederate heritage in particular. The original article can be found here. My own takes on the article will be highlighted as we read through it.

Oh and before I go on, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Mr. Brian Hackett from the Black Confederates In The Civil War facebook page for providing this article for my personal review.

Now without further ado, here we go once into the fray once again.

Confronting Confederate heritage is key to understanding white supremacy 

If we hold up the heritage of a white supremacist society, even if we do so in denial of what that heritage really is, in the end, we reap only hatred, violence, fear, and our own spiritual impoverishment, as is testified to by the entirety of this country’s history.

Wow, already an interesting tagline -- well, not really, but it pretty much sets the stage for the rest of this incoherent rant.

Many white Southerners insist that the Confederate flag they fly so proudly is not a symbol of hate, but a remembrance of, and pride in their heritage.

A small nitpick here, but I'm not really big on his use of a comas.

Unfortunately, Southern heritage, whatever anyone wishes it to be, is almost wholly the heritage of a society defined by slavery, a slaveowners’ society.  Every day for nearly two and a half centuries, slaveowners, their overseers, slave traders, and even some poor whites, murdered, tortured and brutalized tens of thousands of human beings.

Not not really wholly defined by slavery, I mean more that just slavery was happening for 250 years in the American Southland -- I mean there was that whole pesky American Revolutionary War thing in the late 1700s. 

Every day, in this past symbolized by the Confederate flag, slave traders (like Tennessee’s still honored Nathan Bedford Forrest) ripped children out from their mothers’ arms, selling them away from each other. Might it be possible for whites to go about their daily business untroubled amid thousands of Black women and men inconsolably grieving for their lost children, and those children, weeping and wailing for their lost mothers and fathers? 

The Confederate flag (and by that I'm assuming he means the Army of Northern Virginia battle flag as opposed to the three Confederate National banners) could not have flown over "every day, in this past" since the banner only came into existence in November of 1861. I know math isn't my strong point, but pretty certain that the 3 years and five months it saw official service could not mean it was displayed "every day, in this past".
Now then, if the author of this piece is attempting to maintain his argument that the flag is representative of that collective past rather than simply the years of its service as a war banner, then he's being very disingenuous here.

As for his other point, I assume he didn't live all those years in the past. As such he can't know what whites at that time actually thought of those practices. Anything there is speculation without the ability to look back in time and into the souls of every human being living in the past -- which the author so far has made no claim to possess.

Heritage to some, hatred for many

Well you know what they say about opinions and certain orifices.....

How do you suppose our Confederate ancestors spiritually handled this mass of grief and pain played out in front of their eyes every day? How could they remain untouched by such terrible and continuous suffering? White Southerners could survive in this slave-owner society only by closing their hearts and willing themselves not to see, not to hear.

Probably because, with the exception of the 1% of people who had the wealth in that time, most Southerners and Americans were very poor and had to tend to the daily task of staying ahead for themselves and their family's sakes.
A sad fact of existence that no human society has yet to overcome, even in the current century. Every single day many of us are confronted with social, economic and political injustices; yet most of us tend to overlook them because we're more concerned with daily survival and the need to stay ahead least we too get overwhelmed by those same factors.
Today its still easier for many of us to look past the homeless people on the streets than it is to stop and offer help. Easier to look past injustices and not get involved, especially if those action might end up causing disruption in your own life.
Unfortunately that's a sad little character flaw called human nature.

And so, generation after generation of white Southerners hardened their hearts that they might not hear the cries of these millions of human beings.

Uh, I just said that.

Even unto the present generation. 

Many of our Southern ancestors directly participated in the daily horrors of slavery: they bought, and sold, hunted, beat, and murdered human beings.

A fact nobody disputes, or celebrates -- especially people who honor Southern identity and Confederate heritage.

And beyond this, they raped Black women, thousands and thousands of Black women, with complete impunity, for more than two centuries. The masters, their sons and nephews, their brothers and uncles and cousins, all shared in the sexual assault on Black women, even violating Black children.  The overseers joined in too, and, as opportunity permitted, the poor whites partook of this slaveowner’s envied privilege.

And here begin this particular author's somewhat perverted (and very disturbing) fantasies involving sex and rape culture. A word of warning folks, this won't be pretty for here on in.

What Mary Boykin Chestnut wrote in her diary

Well, more likely a watered-down version of what she wrote in her diary....which is a good book and one I highly recommend for any Civil War collection.

Indeed, no white Southerner could escape this sexually lawless society unscathed. Read the Civil War Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut.

Chesnut was wife to a prominent South Carolina Senator and slaveowner.  “Like the patriarchs of old,” Chesnut acknowledged, “our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children — and every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends so to think.” 

How did our plantation mistress, wife to the slaveowner, react when she saw little brown babies “exactly” resembling her white children? Is it any wonder that she always demanded that her husband sell off these, his own children, lest the sight of these brown babies continually recall to her her husband’s infidelities? Is it any wonder that our gracious plantation mistress sought outlet for her anger not by confronting her rapist husband, but by acting still more cruelly towards her husband’s victim, the violated Black woman?

The sad truth is that this is largely true of the large plantation homes and some of the owners. Again a fact acknowledged by history and most people today, but what this has to do specifically with the Confederate flag and its brief relevance to the institution of slavery is still not explained. Just more disturbing obsession with sex and rape violence.

And the poor non-slaveholding whites? Our slave-owning society made of these poor whites an impoverished, diseased, and degraded people. Any good Southern agricultural land would always come to be owned by the slaveowner, leaving the poor white Southerner relegated to the infertile waste lands, lands on which he could not sustain his family.

And the slaveowner certainly had no need to hire the poor white’s labor – if the slaveowner needed a barn built, or needed his horses shoed, or needed his dinner cooked, his slaves did the work.

Yeah and that kind of goes back to the point I made about human nature. People at the top staying on the top and others being held back and having to get by as best as they can. People like, oh say, my own Confederate ancestor who was one of those poor white Southerners with a family and a small plot of land who lived hand-to-mouth till his death. Whose family sometimes worked fields much like those same slaves this author mentions, and would continue to do so in the decades following the war as one of millions of white and black sharecroppers struggling to survive.
But let's not let little details like that get in the way of a nice little "guilt" trip right?

Slavery shaped poor white’s psychology, too
So now, in addition to being a very bad writer, he's a psychologist too? Interesting.

Indeed, in the face of the crippling insecurity of his own life, the only claim the poor white could make for himself was that at least he was not a slave, at least he was not Black.

For two centuries our poor white traded away the possibility of a better life for himself and took in compensation only the thin gruel that he was better than the poor Black. 

In many ways that didn't really matter. Just because someone isn't beaten with a whip does not mean they can't be ground down by other things that are just as painful. In some cases the poor black slave (and sometimes free men of color) had some security under those same slave masters until they passed, while the poor white only had whatever he managed to hold onto -- which was usually not that much.
Not saying that justifies one, or the other, just pointing out a very grim reality.

Southern society based itself upon the degradation of millions and millions of human beings.

Not all of them black either. But again Southern identity as a whole isn't just based on a system of the bourgeois and the proletariat. It wasn't just "moonlight and magnolias" or "mint juleps" either.

That is the heritage represented by the Confederate flag. “Our new government,” boasted Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens in 1861, “is founded upon ... the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man.  That slavery ... is his natural and normal condition.”

Nice cherry-picking, though you should take the time to track down and read the whole speech. You might find its not quite as hyper-focused on one subject as you think. That being said, Stephens was an asshole and even Davis didn't like him.

No one can deny that Southern heritage, and American heritage, which has always taken its lead on race from the South, is a white supremacist heritage.

Not entirely so. People of color of various ethnicity have always played a role in the establishment of the South and America respectively. Their roles might have always been pushed down in favor of white ethnocentric domination (as it was for much of the world for centuries until quite recently) but their efforts had an impact and we are today thankfully acknowledging that and giving these people and their descendants their due. The fact that this author seems unwilling to take that into account in favor of playing the good ole "guilt" card says more about him that it does about all those willing to move forward in a responsible way.

Those who fly the Confederate flag may not be motivated by hate.

But we must all understand this too: if we uphold the heritage of a white supremacist society, even if we do so in denial of what that heritage really is, in the end, we reap only hatred, violence, fear, and our own spiritual impoverishment, as is testified to by the entirety of this country’s history.

So in conclusion, no amount of social progress matters if we can't begin every sentence with "I'm sorry for my ancestry".
Very rarely have I ever encountered anyone who honors Southern and Confederate heritage use that pride to promote any sense of "superiority" in any modern sense. Those few that do are almost always shunned by those of us who accept the greater truth that Southern heritage (and yes that also includes the noble flag of the South) belongs to all Southern people -- and not just those of us that tend to get sunburned easier. There is no denial of that at all. Sorry, but I can't buy your argument.

David Barber is a professor of history at the University of Tennessee at Martin.....and Carl W. Roden is "The Man Deniers Fear The Most".

Final Thoughts

The acknowledgment of the horrors and injustices of chattel slavery in American history is not something that this blogger finds unimportant. Quite the contrary. Recognizing the legacy of the injustice of that flawed system is very important in both understanding where we all came from and where we are headed.

Those of us who honor Southern heritage and identity recognize this fact, even if we do not feel the need to consistently virtue signal that detail and engage in self-flagellation on the alter of politically correct idealism. Being self-reflective of the past wrongs does not mean surrendering to a constant state of professed guilt in the present.

Neither the descendants of slave owners, the descendants of slaves, nor the descendants of poor white Southerners are their ancestors. We have their blood, yes. We have their names, yes. But we are still people living in our own time and place in human history. We can learn from both the good and the bad in our collective past as one Southern people with a shared heritage and continue to promote the positives of all those experiences to build on a foundation with a new cornerstone of mutual respect.

To do otherwise would ensure the sort of spiritual impoverishment that the author of this piece feared, though perhaps not exactly in the way he presents it.

The representation of that positive heritage, the Southern flag the one that Mr. Barber fears and hate irrationally, belongs to all Southern people -- the descendants of all mentioned. That's why I, and millions of others, regardless of the color of our skin, display it and call ourselves proudly Southern people.

And that is the key to defeating white supremacy, as well as any other ideal that puts some above others unjustly.

Again my thanks to Mr. Hackett for providing the focus of this article and giving me the opportunity to further advance the truth of Southern identity and heritage in a positive way. God bless your little heart, sir.

Have a wonderful, Dixie Day, and Y'all come back now, ya hear?

Was Undoing The Snap Actually A Good Thing?

 

Was Undoing The Snap Actually A Good Thing?

And Other Ethical Dilemmas In Popular Geek Culture

By C.W. Roden

 

One of my all-time favorite comedy movies is the 1994 Kevin Smith directed independent film Clerks.

One scene in particular that always puts a smile on my face is the infamous second Death Star destruction debate where Randal makes an argument with his co-worker Dante about the morality of destroying the second Death Star in Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983).

His argument being that because it took the Galactic Empire less time to build the second Death Star they had to hire out independent contractors to help with the construction. Also because the second Death Star was still under construction those same independent contractors were likely still on board when the Rebel Alliance destroyed it. Basically that those alleged independent contractors -- people just trying to make a paycheck and provide for their families and took a government contract -- were killed and became collateral damage in a war they took no part in.

Randal also characterizes the Rebel Alliance as a bunch of "left-wing militants" which this blogger would strongly argue wasn't the case, but that's another argument for another time.

It's at this point in the film that someone in the store (who happens to be an independent contractor) overhearing the conversation points out to Dante and Randal that those independent contractors understood what they were getting into when they took the job, hence they took a side and were actively working with the Empire to construct their station/super-weapon and became legitimate targets for the subsequent military action taken by the Rebel Alliance.

This debate became so famous in fandom circles that even Star Wars creator George Lucas addressed it in the commentary for Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002) -- though in my opinion not in a satisfactory way.
 

Another million Imperials (and possible independent contractors) killed
-- complements of Lando Calrissian and Wedge Antilles.

Adding my own two cents I would point out that Randal was completely wrong about the first fully operational and completed Death Star being manned just by Imperials.

There were multiple detention centers on that Death Star similar to the one that Princess Leia was being held prisoner in, meaning there were likely dozens of military and civilian prisoners, all enemies of the Empire, who also died during that raid. Granted at least some of these hypothetical prisoners might have been legitimate criminals -- spice smugglers, slave dealers, space pirates, ect. -- rather than rebel "trouble-makers" but even they deserved to have legal due process rather than simply becoming collateral damage.

There are real-life historical precedents to this, such as the dozen U.S. military prisoners held by the Japanese military in Hiroshima who were killed in the August 6, 1945 atomic bombing of the city, along with tens of thousands of Japanese civilians and soldiers. The U.S. military knew that there were likely American and Allied prisoners there, but judged the demonstration of the bomb and its subsequent impact on the Japanese military warlords running the country justified their sacrifice. 

Like the Japanese Empire and their war of aggression, the Galactic Empire had to be stopped from using their planet-killing weapon to further enslave the galaxy, and the Rebel Alliance did what they had to do, regardless of the collateral damage.

In short, they had to think of the greater good.


Ethical Dilemmas In Popular Culture & Their Real Life Parallels

Much like our two favorite Gen X slackers in Clerks, I've always enjoyed those sorts of moral debates when it comes to fictional characters and situations in cinematic popular culture and literature. At almost every fandom convention,  pop culture website, or geek blog one can find endless debates on topics like these; and believe me between my own Gen X and the Millennial generation, we've come up some doozies over the years.

Yet some of these very questions posed over the actions of fictional characters actually have some significant and interesting real-life parallels. 

Here are just a few examples:

Are all the Slytherins in the Harry Potter franchise actually evil people?

Certainly not all of them were like Draco Malfoy and his gang, several of whom were the children of the evil Lord Voldemort's followers, the Death Eaters. Mostly likely the rest of the students from Slytherin House just wanted to keep their heads down and stay neutral. Others were likely just loyal to their families and the people who loved them -- remember these are children and their parents who loved them and raised them, even if those same parents were prejudiced monsters who followed Voldemort and committed horrible terrorist acts in his name. Love for family can make you very short-sighted when it comes to their flaws at times. Some of them might not have even shared those prejudices at all. Indeed odds are good that not every single Slytherin student came from parents who were Death Eaters, or were even so-called "Purebloods" and many might not have had any connections to Voldemort's cause at all.

Also remember that the other three-quarters of the school were already against them, or viewed them with suspicion. If any of them were questioning the views of Draco Malfoy, and the Death Eaters children, then who could they have turned to? Harry Potter? We know how he felt about the Slytherins based on his experiences with Malfoy. Dumbledore? The guy who gave Gryffindor House the win at the end of book one by adding all those house points at the last minute? Since we don't really have any Slytherin student's points of view in the novels, we can never know.

In the end none of them were given any real chance to join the others in defending Hogwarts in the final battle, having been judged to be untrustworthy and simply dismissed; themselves the victims of prejudiced stereotyping of the very sort the "good guys" were supposedly fighting against. Did they deserve to all be labeled as threats?

For that matter how do we know for certain that Salizar Slytherin, the founder of the Hogwarts House, was motivated entirely on racial prejudice because of his preferences for all-magic families? Remember that the history of who Slytherin was was largely written by the people he found himself at odds with, hardly an unbiased source. When Hogwarts was founded it was during the European Middle Ages -- the "burning times" as some of my Wiccan friends would call them -- and Muggles (non-magic people) regarded wizards and witches as evil and dangerous. Could he have been concerned that some Muggleborn student would have sold them out, willingly or otherwise, and simply acted under a very real fear taken to extremes? The Hogwarts Sorting Hat did point out in book five (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) that both Slytherin and Godric Gryffindor had been best friends before -- unlikely partnership if one of them had been an evil dark wizard.  

 

Both of these pose good real-life questions over the idea of stereotyping people and revisionist history respectively. 

Another example would be the question: Is Master Chief in the Halo game franchise really a hero, or a mass murdering planet killer?

I'm being serious, well at least as serious as this nerd culture talk can get. Sure Master Chief saved humanity from the Covenant and their plans to wipe it out life in the galaxy at the end of the first Halo game when he destroyed the massive ringworld superweapon.

However, as one can see in the game, the Halo had a living biosphere complete with biological life: plants and animals. The animals that existed on the land and water habitat on the ringworld had no say in the fact they were born on a massive superweapon. Certainly the life-killing super-weapon had to be stopped, but did the lifeforms inhabiting the ringworld deserve to be sacrificed on the alter of war? This is a deeply ethical question when it comes to war and those innocents caught in the crossfire of two competing enemies.

Obviously preventing the destruction of Earth -- and most intelligent life in much of the galaxy -- was a top priority for Master Chief and the humans. All the same could there have been another way of stopping the first Halo from being used by the Covenant that would have damaged the weapon, but spared the biosphere from being destroyed along with it?

In that case though none of the lifeforms on the Halo ringworld were shown to be sentient -- fully self-aware and possessing consciousness, even in an early evolutionary state. If they had, then the crime of causing their extinction through outside interference with their natural development becomes even more serious.

The real-life parallel here involves us Earthlings sending probes to Mars looking for signs of micro-biological life. If we actually find it beneath the surface, possibly in geothermal vents, or theorized underground water sources, the question arises: what then? Do we then continue to sent objects from Earth to Mars, which carry our own native bacterial life, and pollute another ecosystem? Does our own scientific curiosity as a species outweigh the ethical argument of interfering with lifeforms (even bacteria) alien to us?

If we were talking Star Trek here, the Prime Directive would certainly come into play surely.

Certainly in the world of comic books and graphic novels, the actions of superheroes have recently been brought into question. Are they really heroes, or just vigilantes who take the law into their own hands? I mean granted their actions stop even worse people from doing terrible things, but in doing so they violate international borders, fail to notify local authorities, and put populations of cities in danger while fighting their enemies.

There is a fine line, and its something that popular culture and social media has been recently addressing, again echoing real life events.

Over the last few years, these sorts of moral debates have made their way into popular superhero movies and literature, like the major debate by fans over Superman destroying half of Metropolis, and likely killing hundreds of people, to stop the tyrant General Zod from destroying the rest of the Earth in the DC Comics film Man of Steel (2013). This became such a serious debate that it was touched on as a major plot point in the film's sequel, Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016).

Obviously Superman could not simply do nothing while Zod and his minions destroyed the Earth, and a fight between two men with equal strength and potentially deadly powers like lazer-beam eyes is going to result in some collateral damage. Given the alternatives, the civilian casualties, while certainly terrible, pale in comparison to a dead planet and the extinction of humanity itself. Though that would be small consolation to the families of the dead and permanently maimed.

Ironically, no similar debate initially took place a year earlier in Marvel's The Avengers (2012) when the Avengers fought the alien Chitauri forces commanded by Thor's demented brother, Loki; a battle that also took a number of civilian lives and left a large number of human casualties. Although later in Captain America: Civil War (2016) the issue of oversight comes into question as a major plot twist that divides the team.

The irony in that is that neither side in the debate over the Sokovia Accords is entirely wrong. Yes, people who have super human abilities do need to be reminded why they use their powers to fight, namely to protect the innocent from dangerous threats. Remember that with that power comes a sense of greater responsibility -- thank you for that bit of wisdom, Uncle Ben!

At the same time, are the Avengers, the X-Men, or The Fantastic Four supposed to just sit and wait on some U.N. committee to endlessly debate authorizing them to stop someone like Doctor Doom, Magneto, or Mister Sinister -- people who have similar powers while clearly showing no ethical restraint in how they utilize them -- from doing something terrible somewhere? 

While were at it, just what about that civilian authority itself? The last time the Avengers put themselves under the command of an authority -- namely S.H.I.E.L.D. -- it turned out to be infiltrated and controlled by agents of the Nazi-like terror organization, Hydra. So obviously blind trust in any authority is also a no-no. 

There have been serious debates over the morality of authority over superheroes in the X-Men comics, cartoons, and films. Is the proposed Mutant Registration Act in the first X-Men film really just about the U.S. government keeping track of people out of fear of their abilities; or are those a means of finding out who they are, what they can do, and a build-up to an inevitable rounding up and arrest of all said people with special abilities?

There are obvious real-life parallels to both of these examples when it comes to the debate on gun ownership rights, the 2nd Amendment, and so-called Red Flag laws to keep track of the "dangerous people" -- at least those deemed dangerous as defined by the standards of whomever the current political establishment is at any given time depending on election cycles. 

Other parallels to real life within the X-Men story arcs concern discrimination based on racism and sexual orientation. It draws deliberate parallels between the oppression of mutants and that of other marginalized groups. These are well documented online on many fan sites and have been debated endlessly for nearly two decades now.

Now to your average normie the idea of a subculture of fanboys and fangirls endlessly discussing the ethics and morality of what happens to their favorite fictional characters and the worlds they inhabit might seem amusing, even childish. I mean who really cares who shot first: Han Solo, or Greedo? (Writer's note: It was Han dammit!) Some of these same people probably wouldn't admit that they themselves cried over a favorite character in a novel, or movie dying.

 

All the same, one cannot deny that the real-life parallels these stories mirror evoke very strong feelings. 

 

That brings me to the subject of this article that I would like to address: Was undoing the Snap actually a good thing? I'm going to pull a Randal here and offer y'all my own observations on the topic.


The Causes & Effect Of The Snap

With the release of Marvel's Avengers: Endgame (2019) your favorite blogger had the chance recently to re-watch this cinematic masterpiece all over again after having watched it on the big screen twice before the current pandemic made movie theaters passe. 

 

The movie takes place in the immediate aftermath of the events of the previous Marvel film, Avengers: Infinity War (2018), where the genocidal Titan, Thanos, used the power of the Infinity Gauntlet containing the six powerful infinity stones to literally snap half of all the life in the universe out of existence -- including a large number of our heroes and their families.

Worse, according to Marvel Cinematic Universe Wiki, Thanos did far more than just take out half of the universe's population. According to the site there were at least 3,797,000,000 humans confirmed deceased or missing worldwide. Both sentient and insentient beings perished in the Snap, including the bacteria in the bodies of the Snap survivors. The effects were similar across inhabited worlds throughout the universe, and even in the Multiverse and places such as the Quantum Realm.

In the MCU, Thanos was insane and thought that his cold decimation of half the life in the universe would bring about a reversal of the damage overpopulation caused on his own ravaged world. This is what makes Thanos such a compelling villain. Like all the best bad guys, Thanos believes himself to actually be the hero; and that his actions, no matter how insane they actually are, are justified for the greater good.

Actual real-life science however tells a whole different story.

 

In the well-written 2019 article The Real World Effect of Thanos' Infinity War Snap Explained by Scientists by Kevin Burwick which largely addresses this sort of topic about the real-life application of events in the Marvel cinematic universe. He goes into specific details about what would happen if half the life on Earth were suddenly gone -- and they aren't very pretty.

According to the article, if Thanos snapped away half of Earth's 7.6 billion people, we'd be left with 3.8 billion people, which brings us roughly back to 1970, in terms of population. But add to that the loss of the animals and plant life, the effects would be pretty catastrophic, perhaps even as bad as an extinction level event where a comet or asteroid strikes the Earth.

With half of the humans and animals gone on Earth, there would be major changes in the food chain. While humans would get the population back to normal in a few decades, the food chain and ecosystem could be heavily effected for animals who don't reproduce quickly, particularly those who were already endangered species.

This would have a major impact on humanity itself. For example imagine what the loss of half the world's honeybees and other pollinators would have a very serious impact on human food sources. We would see fresh water and other sources of food corrupted without some species of fish and bacteria. Some of the most endangered species on Earth would likely die out within a couple of years. With the ecosystem under such strain, life would change quite a lot for humanity.

Now having looked at the long-term consequences, let's look at the immediate aftermath of the Snap and the very human cost of Thanos' grand design.

As we watched in Avengers: Infinity War, there were people driving cars, flying planes, and doing other activities when the Snap occurred. We witness a helicopter crash into a building, both of which probably still had people in them who were suddenly killed. Same with people in cars where the driver suddenly turns into dust. The people in the cars who didn't disappear would suddenly find themselves in millions of automobile accidents, some of which would likely to be fatal ones.

Now just imagine this one. There are tens of thousands of airplanes in the sky, worldwide at any given time. Now imagine if each of those planes has around a few  to a couple hundred people on them and a pilot suddenly disappears, that's nearly a million more deaths when the planes crash.

It would be the Biblical Rapture for all intents and purposes, and that leads to another problem: the reactions of the survivors themselves.

The loss of their loved ones would certainly drive some people insane with grief and survivor guilt. Children would be orphaned, parents would lose children and spouses, brothers and sisters. Anyone who has ever dealt with the loss of a loved one would understand how terrible the grief is. Imagine losing half of your loved ones, if not all of them at once. Some more deeply religious people might even become unhinged with zealotry and turn into people they otherwise would never have become before. Many others would take their lives to be with their lost loved ones.

Not just on Earth, but this scenario would be playing out on planet after planet across the universe and the multiverse itself.


Undoing The Snap

Now that I've laid out the major details -- and I'm sure I missed a few others, but bare with me here folks -- this is the world that we are introduced to at the beginning of Endgame with the story doing a time jump of five years after the Snap itself -- now referred to in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as "The Blip".

Our remaining heroes are still dealing with the aftermath of the Snap and believing they have failed in their mission to stop Thanos, who destroyed the Infinity Stones to prevent his actions from being reversed. Some continue to help pick up the pieces on Earth and across the galaxy at large, others have retired and moved on in one form or another, and one -- Clint "Hawkeye" Barton -- has become a vigilante after the dusting of his entire family.

Of course, with the return of Ant-Man from the Quantum Realm, where he'd been trapped for five years (or only a couple hours from his perspective) our heroes now have a means to retrieve the lost Infinity Stones and undo the losses caused by Thanos.

Now, obviously by now everyone has seen what happened, so I don't think I need to offer a spoiler alert for this: everyone who was dusted was brought back, all the superheroes that were lost return and join up with the survivors to lay the biggest smackdown in cinematic history on Thanos and his minions (actually, our heroes barely managed to stop him from doing far worse to reality).

All the same in the end evil is punished, slightly bittersweet happy ending with the selfless sacrifice of Tony Stark and an aged Steve Rogers passing the Captain America shield to Sam Wilson, and so now everyone is back and everything can go back to normal, right?

Nope. Wrong. Nada. Tort. Nein. Nyet. Chigau. Chowu de.

No doubt, like everyone else who saw Avengers: Endgame in the packed theaters back in the days just before the world was quarantined by the Covid-19 virus, the moment Hulk snapped, you were sitting there hoping that it worked. Like me, you probably felt that rush of relief when Hawkeye got the phone call from his vanished wife. And probably geeked out when all of the Avengers and characters of the MCU who were dusted reappear. It wasn't a happy moment, but also a totally epic moment seeing all of them gathered to finally put an end to the mad Titan and his minions.

That first time around, you really didn't have time to think about the other, long-ranging consequences of the reverse snap.

And it must be really crazy when you think about it ...3.5 billion people on Earth who were gone suddenly reappearing in the places where they disappeared five years later.

This conversation was always abstract and somewhat irrelevant before, but now not so much thanks to the continuing MCU films like Spider-Man:Far From Home (2019) and the Disney+ Marvel mini-series stories.

But while Far From Home showed the jokey side of the reverse Snap, WandaVision meanwhile showed us the psychological horror side of the reverse Snap.

In WandaVision, we found out that Maria Rambeau died of cancer after watching her only child, Monica Rambeau, turn to dust in her bedside chair and her daughter learning that terrible truth after coming back with no idea of time passing at all. Monica has to learn that, not only did her mother die from cancer that came back after receiving prior news that the surgery was successful, but that she and others disappeared and lost five years of time.

This scene showed the anxiety and panic of what the blink would be like for the vanished. Imagine yourself somewhere and, all of a sudden, with absolutely no realization that any time had passed; everything around you is abruptly different. In one instant you can't find your loved ones, or understand what's happening, only that everyone around you is just as lost and panicked as you are.

Could you imagine the utter chaos? The families that were broken apart, friends, businesses, governments even. Suddenly finding out your loved ones have got on with their lives after you disappeared. Re-married, had kids etc. Imagine coming back to not recognizing your own children as they were babies when the first snap happened. Running to what once was your home to find strangers living there, or worse, your partner with their new family. Or perhaps some family member driven to religious zealotry over your loss and then thinking you were not you when you returned?

And those would perhaps be the lucky ones.

Imagine finding out that the plane you were in crashed and you reappear okay, but that the family you were with died in a crash when the pilot of that plane also vanished. So, yeah people riding on planes, people riding subway, people driving cars on the highway, sailors on submarines or on ships in the middle of the ocean. There's a lot of potential horror stories that could happen on the reverse snap.

What about the consequences to the rest of the world at large? The whole economy and infrastructure is going down after you barely building it up to normal for half the population in five years, and suddenly the population returns to the pre-Snap level. What about the world leaders and monarchs that disappeared and then returned to find out they no longer hold office?

Some of the potential disruption and the consequences are addressed in the series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier where the new Captain America, Sam Wilson, and the former brainwashed assassin, Bucky Barnes, must deal with the threat of the antifa-type terrorist Flag Smashers group that seeks to establish their own new world order based on the post-Snap/pre-Blip world.

Not to mention the ecological issues. The newly extinct endangered animals getting half their population back, only to go extinct again potentially. The complete damage to the food chain with a sudden doubling of the animal population that likely began to slightly rebound before.

Crazy right?

So yes, Thanos is defeated -- though he probably wouldn't have needed to be if the Avengers didn't mess around with time and draw his attention again -- and all our heroes were brought back. Yet in doing so, they end up doing just as much damage as Thanos initially did, only in a different way.


Conclusion

Am I saying that it would have been better to leave those people gone? That would not be for me to say, I'm no philosopher. What I'm saying is that sometimes the cure can be as bittersweet, even as deadly, as the sickness itself.

Like all of the Avenger's actions, there are consequences that hold equally important ramifications. Save the world, but still people die. Stop universal Armageddon, but in doing so they created just as much disruption as those they were protecting the universe from. The real question should be: in the long-run was doing it worth it for the greater good?

Many like Clint Barton would say yes, while other potential Baron Helmut Zemo created from the end results might argue otherwise.

This is the definition of good storytelling though. You can feel glad that the good guys won, yet also feel that punch in your stomach over what cost they paid for that hard-won victory.

It also gives people like Dante and Randal something to bitch about between dealing with customers and putting up with Jay and Silent Bob's pot-dealing antics.

For the rest of us fandom fanatics, it gives us some serious food for thought.

This article is dedicated to the memory of
Mr. Chadwick Aaron Boseman (1976 - 2020).
Thank you for your dedication in bringing to
life Marvel's Black Panther to the big screen.
RIP Chad....and let Stan know we still
miss him too.
(Image courtesy of facebook)

Why I Talk About Local History On This Blog

In the now eight years since I began this humble little blog site, I've had a number of people ask me about my historical posts here, and why I do them.

Well, history is my number one hobby, other than astronomy that is. American military history is a major passion of mine. Rather strange considering my often stated staunch anti-war views, yes I know.

But there's more to why I choose to dedicate much of my blog site to discussion about the history of my part of South Carolina. That reason is to give folks a better understanding that there's more to this humble little section of my home state than y'all might realize.

When most people in the rest of the good ole U.S. of A. think of the State of South Carolina, more often than not they think of golden sandy beaches along our little section of the East Coast. Spring and summer destinations like Myrtle Beach along the Grand Strand and the tropical islands further south like Hilton Head are usually the first that come to mind. 

This reason is usually why some older folks refer to native South Carolinians as "Sandlappers" despite the fact that most of us don't actually live near the coast itself.

Then again if its history that most fellow Americans think of, again it brings us back to the coast to the old City of Charleston where Edward "Blackbeard" Teach once walked the cobblestone streets near the battery, or Fort Sumter where the open shots of the War Between The States (that's American Civil War to everyone else) were fired.

Ah yes, Charleston (formerly Charles Town before South Carolina and 12 other former British Colonies decided that King George III was no longer our sovereign) where the Cooper and Ashley Rivers join to form the Atlantic Ocean....at least it does according to the folks native to the area.

Sometimes there are those travelers and visitors to our little corner of Dixie who prefer hikes through the beautiful cypress gardens and swamps in the lowlands, or to the beautiful waterfalls and the top of Table Rock Mountain in the upstate boarding the old Appalachian Mountain Range. There are even those who love to go canoeing , or kayaking among the many rivers in the South Carolina, particularly the mighty Savannah River that borders the Great State of Georgia to the west. 

Oh and yes, there's also the historic sites in and around the State's historic capital city of Columbia located on the Piedmont foothills, which also includes one of the best zoos in the American Southland located right along the Saluda River. There are also historic battlefields near Camden where British and Continental Armies fought in the final years of the American Revolutionary War.

And the rest is a bunch of cotton fields, peach orchards, some forests, and cow-patty-covered farmland pretty much. Well, at least that's more-or-less the impression most people get when visiting my home state. Hell, sometimes its the impression some of the people who've lived here their whole lives seem to have too.

As for yours truly, I live here in Chester County located right on the border between what is considered the South Carolina Upstate and the Midlands Regions -- though officially its located in the latter. Chester County is located between two major rivers, the Broad River to the west and the Catawba River to the east.

As far as being the center of excitement, or a popular tourist spot, Chester County is, well, pretty much neither I'll freely admit. Pretty much a sleepy little county situated between Columbia fifty miles to the south and Charlotte, North Carolina about thirty miles to the north.

Aside from being located on US Highway 321 and Interstate 77, Chester County is usually best noted as being a convenient place to stop for food, or to fill up on gas, or fast food for tourists traveling through to go to one of the destinations that I've previously mentioned.

The City of Chester, the county seat and largest town in the county, is a relatively sleepy-little small Southern town surrounded by livestock-wandering fields, farmlands, and some wooded areas. Chester County itself does boast of having two lovely State Parks: Chester State Park and Landsford Canal State Park by the Catawba River, both of which are pretty awesome to visit.

Otherwise, as I said, a rather sleepy little town in what some might consider one of the lesser important regions of a State full of coastal vacation spots and tourist attractions for families and sports-persons.

However, Chester County and the surrounding part of upper South Carolina is not without its fair share of important and fascinating history; some of which had a major impact in shaping the United States into the nation it would become after its founding. Some major historical figures took part in some of that same history and their presence in terms of their actions can still be felt today if you know where to look.

Much of that history, which I've learned over the course of a lifetime, helped shape my understanding and love of history and for the lives of those who came before me. One of the missions of this blog site will be to share some of the stories of that history and better help educate y'all on what it means to me in terms of how I personally identify and promote my heritage.

That heritage can be found on the names of old headstones in historic cemeteries, on war memorials, in the histories of certain landmarks, and even in the very names of certain places and rivers. History and identity that go back a very long time. Long before my humble little corner of Dixie was even a U.S. State, even before it was even known as South Carolina -- even before human beings first walked on its soil!

Now, before I go on, I need to make a few thing very clear.

I'm not a trained historian, nor claim to be. I've studied history in school, but not in college (I did attend technical college for a time) and any knowledge I share on this blog comes strictly from my own personal research and from a (presently) 35 year hobby of learning and independent study. Because of this I don't encourage any of y'all to simply take my word alone on any of the information I provide. I wouldn't recommend taking any one source as fact, even from people who call themselves credited historians.

That being said I will promise to provide some background information for anything I post on this site and I will not rely completely on anecdotal knowledge passed off as fact. Anything that cannot be confirmed will be noted as such, or I'll simply leave out of what I can confirm as fact. Everything I share will be the truth as I know and have come to understand it to be.

Anyone who reads my historical posts is free to challenge my arguments, or add to them with their own facts. Oh and I'll sweeten the pot by offering a $50 bounty on any factual errors a reader might find -- and no accidental misspellings don't count. I take pride in my research and feel no need to deliberately mislead anyone, or write propaganda.

I'm also aware that some of what I write from a historical narrative might come off as seemingly biased to some readers.

While I admit that I hold a certain fondness for, oh say, the Patriot militia soldiers in the American Revolutionary War, or the Confederate soldier in the War Between the States, for obvious reasons; I will endeavor to promise that my work is not intended to promote anyone's propaganda, nor to shill for anyone's modern-day causes. This is my work and mine alone and is not formally endorsed by any organization, or group.

Finally, as I've mentioned before I hold Constitutional Conservative and Libertarian values, but I will endeavor to keep modern politics out of my views of history and heritage, and how I present both. Anyone who comes here looking for "rage-bait" or a means to attack another individual for their own politics is going to come away severely disappointed.

Though I certainly admire both late, great men, I'm neither Shelby Foote or Lewis Grizzard. But I'll certainly continue do all that I can to inform and educate, while adding my own little bit of humor from time to time.

Happy 30th Birthday Sailor Moon!

On this day 30 years ago on March 7, 1992, the superheroine anime series Sailor Moon debuted on TV Asahi in Japan.

The original run of the show, known in Japan as Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon -- later as Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon -- was produced by Toei Animation and was based on the outstanding manga series of the same name written by Naoko Takeuchi published from 1991 to 1997 in Nakayoshi.

The anime series was first aired in Japan on Saturday, March 7, 1992 with the first episode "The Crybaby: Usagi’s Beautiful Transformation" and would run until Saturday, February 8, 1997. Later the series would be dubbed into various territories around the world, including the United States where it would become intensely popular among animation fans at the time.

The English dubbing of Sailor Moon was first done by DIC Productions, L.P. (now Wildbrain) and the series premiered in Canada on August 28, 1995 on YTV and in first-run syndication in the United States on September 11th of the same year with the title of the first episode being renamed "A Moon Star Is Born".

Despite being cancelled after the first two seasons and being put in lousy time slots, thanks to a fan petition the English dub of the series would continue production and later go on to appear on the USA Network in 1997, and then later on Cartoon Network's weekly anime block Toonami in the late 90s and early 2000s -- fondly remembered by many anime fans today as the golden years of Toonami. 

The story of Sailor Moon is fairly simple. A 14-year-old underachieving young schoolgirl named Usagi Tsukino (Serena in the English dub) meets a magical talking cat named Luna. Luna gives Usagi  a magic wand and the ability to transform into her magical alter ego, Sailor Moon. Usagi is then tasked with locating the moon princess and battling the evil forces of the Dark Kingdom (the Negaverse in the English dub).

When Usagi transforms for the first time into her magical sailor suit with Luna's help, she overreacts and then reluctantly accepts her fate, not sure what has happened to her. At the time she does not know the enemies she will face, the friends she will make, or the experiences ahead of  her. All this despite the fact that she's a somewhat lazy underachiever, and more than just a bit clumsy at times.

As she moves forward in the series, she accepts her fate, finds allies with a core friend group of other girls with similar magical abilities, discovers true love with a dashing and mysterious male ally, and realizes the importance of fighting evil and defending the innocent -- all the while maintaining her charming (and admittingly annoying at times) young teenage demeanor.

All of this is a lot of pressure for a high school girl, obviously. This is made much more so as time goes on and she discovers the truth about her ultimate destiny (sorry no spoilers!). All the same the times when Usagi steps up and gets serious as Sailor Moon shows her growing into her role as defender of the Earth.

The series itself was largely brought over to the U.S. to capitalize on the success of shows like the widely popular Mighty Morphin Power Rangers TV series.

In a way, Sailor Moon ran pretty much along the same basic superhero formula as Power Rangers: the bad guy sends a monster, Sailor Moon and her Sailor Scouts face it, do their power moves on said monster of the day, and then Sailor Moon uses her finishing move and vanquishes the creature; all the while dealing with some everyday teenage crisis which usually involves someone's relationship issues -- hey these are teenage girls we're talking about here.

Yet the story arcs are done so well that the series hooks you and then you find yourself waiting to see what happens next and how Sailor Moon and her friends are going to overcome their adversaries. The series -- particularly the first three seasons -- are charming and written very well.

Though the series is largely targeted towards female audiences, it does have a major following among male audiences as well -- your favorite blogger included.

So, is it weird for a guy to like a series targeted for girls? Well, even as a boy in the 80s I -- like many other boys of that generation who will admit to it -- watched cartoon shows like She-Ra: Princess of Power (largely due to the connection to He-Man: And the Masters of the Universe) on Saturday mornings.

The cartoons we watched as Gen-X kids in the 80s and early 90s were largely interchangeable with boys and girls enjoying a wide selection of shows regardless of how they were marketed. I've known just as many girls at that age who idolized Lady Jaye and Scarlett on G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero and just as many boys who knew all the characters on Strawberry Shortcake TV specials. As for me, I'll freely admit to jamming to all the Jem and the Holograms songs from time to time. 

Today as an anime fan (and a currently 45 year old pseudo-adult) I'll admit that a younger 19 year old version of yours truly first got hooked onto this series in the summer of 1996 during a boring summer following my first job after high school. I would come home from work and unwind in front of the television in time to see an episode of Sailor Moon in the late afternoon time slot when nothing else was worth watching other than talk shows, and became interested in what happened next. So much so that, when my work schedule changed, I set my VCR to record the episodes so I could watch them later.

Even though the series is pretty light-hearted, I admit that a couple of scenes in a few episodes hit me in the feels too. One death scene in particular in the season one episode: "Naru's Tears: Nephrite Dies for Love" ("A Friend in Wolf's Clothing" in the English dub) where one of Sailor Moon's antagonists, Nephrite, sacrifices himself to save one of Usagi's friends, Naru, and passes away in her arms after apologizing to her. Many fans of the series site that moment as one of the saddest of the series.

Naturally, as this show turned into probably my formal gateway into anime (actually Mobile Suit Gundam was my first official anime series, though I never got into it very deeply) other series eventually took over as favorites of mine, especially once I began watching late-nite Cartoon Network's Toonami block in the late 90s. Other shows like the ever-popular Pokemon series would eventually bring Japanese animation fully into the American mainstream.

All the same, Sailor Moon will always be remembered fondly by me and many other devoted anime fans as the one series that led us down the deep rabbit hole of Japanese animation.

Happy 30th Birthday, Sailor Moon -- Thank you for all the memories!

"Fighting evil by moonlight, winning love by daylight,
never running from a real fight -- she is the one named
Sailor Moon."
Image courtesy of Toei Animation, Japan.

Night Sky Photography -- 03-06-2022 -- The Constellations And Major Stars Of The Winter Circle In One Shot!

Good evening fellow stargazers!

Happy March everyone! The month that sees the winter season give way to the renewal of the spring equinox on Sunday, March 20th.

In the evening and night sky dome the six main constellations that make up the Winter Circle (or Winter Hexagon) will continue to be visible in clear skies even as they continue to move west following the setting sun as winter gives way to spring in the Northern Hemisphere.

As I've mentioned in previous Night Sky Photography posts on this blog, the Winter Circle consists of seven bright stars in six separate constellations:

Pollux and Castor in the Constellation Gemini the Twins
Procyon in the the Constellation Canis Minor the Lesser Dog
Sirius in the Constellation Canis Major the Greater Dog
Rigel in the Constellation Orion the Hunter
Aldebaran in the Constellation Taurus the Bull
Capella in the Constellation Auriga the Charioteer

With the exception of the star Castor in the Constellation Gemini, the Winter Circle stars are all 1st-magnitude with Sirius (the Dog Star) being among the brightest stars in our sky. Castor is slightly fainter 2nd magnitude star, though still very bright and visible next to its companion twin, Pollux.

This evening, I was able to capture virtually all the major stars of five of the six constellations of the Winter Circle with one exception. Though I was able to capture the bright star Sirius, the Constellation Canis Major unfortunately would not completely fit in the frame from the only angle I was able to pick up all the stars of the other constellations with.

The following are the photos I was able to take, the first of the major stars in the Winter Circle (outlined in blue) and then the second photos outlining the constellations themselves in white with the Winter Triangle (outlined in red) inside the Winter Circle itself.

Oh and for those of y'all wondering, that small orb-like thing on the bottom right of the photographs is NOT a UFO! It's just the road light that blew out in my front yard recently that the folks at the power company has yet to fix. Thankfully the blown bulb allows for both some foreground scale, and for less light pollution where I didn't have to drive a few miles away to some open field for the shot, so no complaints there at all.

The Winter Circle will still remain fully visible throughout the rest of the month of March with our lovely moon passing between Aldebaran and the Pleiades Star Cluster this week on Tuesday, March 8th and Luna beginning her march through the Winter Circle phasing to First Quarter beauty on Thursday, March 10th. Y'all be sure to check that out -- God and clear skies willing that is.