I can see where you’re coming from now with your initial take on this whole confederate soldier situation. You’re putting yourself into the shoes of a scared shitless kid who would do anything to make it out of a horrible situation still breathing, even if that meant staying in the army and facing battle lines of Union soldiers. But I think your past trauma is causing you to misinterpret the historical situation that existed. I mean, just think about the logistics of this for a minute. People could and did desert the Confederate army all the time. Granted, if they were caught, they’d be shot or hung, but it happened a lot. In between battles, hundreds of soldiers would just disappear into the woods and go to ground. Over the course of a long campaign, that’s a lot of chances to change your fate.

I understand that because of your life experiences, you have a lot of empathy for the people who were not the direct beneficiaries of slavery, but defended it nonetheless because you see scared, idiot kids who are too afraid to rock the boat. But the thing is, you’ll find that in every war. The Confederate cause is no better than the Nazi cause, or the cause of the Khmer Rouge. People will often perform acts of evil to save themselves, or because they think they have no better choice, but that doesn’t absolve the evil they did. Those soldiers buried in that cemetery may have gone on to do great things with their lives to try to erase the moral stain they left behind in their youth if they had lived through the civil war, but they didn’t. And as I said earlier, it’s not your potential for good or your intentions to do good that matter; it’s your actions. And their actions were to defend slavery.

If I could be so bold as to be an armchair psychologist, I’m guessing that you need to think that these people were better than I’m painting them to be because you need to believe that the shitty things you’ve done in your life don’t define who you are. I’m not going to sneer at that; that’s very understandable. And true. You are not now who you were then. You can’t go back and change who you were, but going forward, you have opportunities to help people. The last thing I’ll say on the subject is: while the story you shared is definitely on a different level than yelling at Karen in Accounting, it’s still a far cry from what the Confederates did. You were a junkie in thrall to an incredibly addictive drug. People routinely give up everything for it. It is the world. You got into some incredibly sketchy situations and you helped to ruin at least one life. Confederates ruined millions of lives. Intentionally. And not just the people living then, but all of the generations from those people to now feel the sting of what they did. They are in a whole different classification of evil.

You speculate that I’m young or lack life experience, and maybe that’s relatively true compared to you. I don’t know how old you are, but I’m in my 50s, and I’ve had my fair share of life experiences as well. It could just be that my, I guess, moral zealotry has never had occasion to be sufficiently blunted by what life has thrown at me. But I would say that it’s not that I see the world in black and white terms, which is something that several people have said to me; it’s more that I have a low opinion of people in general and that tints how I see interactions and events. The thing that gets me is that we’ve had philosophers telling us how to be better than we are for about as long as we were able to use abstract language, and we’re still just as awful now as we were then. I think that while times and technology change, people do not. Sure, we are highly adaptable, but every man’s a fortress, and inside that fortress, we haven’t changed at all.