Oregon's amputated Civil War memory

While Oregonians celebrate the coming of "The Civil War” football game on Saturday, we will continue to blindly forget that the words "Civil War" have chilling meaning.

In is now believed that some 700,000 Americans died in our American Civil War. That’s a number larger than the population of Portland. Imagine a city erased by death.

And yet we persist in calling a football game “The Civil War.”
 
For decades Americans and fought and died abroad in what were civil wars: in Korea, in Vietnam, in Iraq. Today they fight and die in Afghanistan. Tomorrow young Americans could join the civil war in Syria. As I write the fighting going is going on in Gaza, a battlefield in an endless, intermittent civil war between Palestinians and Israelis.

And yet we persist in calling a mere football game “The Civil War.”

To Duck and Beaver fans and other Oregon sports spectators, I commend reading THIS in today's New York Times:

The article closes with the following words:

Amputation was the most common Civil War surgical procedure. Union surgeons performed approximately 30,000 compared to just over 16,000 by American surgeons in World War II. One postwar British traveler noted that amputees were “everywhere in town and farm communities through the South.” The men who had survived the surgeon’s knife were a visible reminder of the Civil War for decades.
No longer. Today's veterans more often suffer from the torment of memory. The haunted have taken their own lives by the thousands.

Yet today, in Oregon, we and the media have amputated the darker meaning of “Civil War” from our minds. We are victims of our own ignorance and insensitivity.

Oregonians, it is well past time for us to come up with a joyful, playful name for our friendly, passionate rivalry — and to end our "Civil War."

"Let us then try what love will do."

A recent trip to Philadelphia and a deepening interest in Quaker history has left me intrigued by an aphorism from William Penn (1644 – 1718).

In his book “The Fruits of Solitude,” Penn, an early Quaker and the founder of colonial Pennsylvania, wrote:

Let us then try what love will do.

In these times of strife of all kinds (economic, political, military), Penn’s suggestion about “trying” love speaks to our condition as much as it did to the turbulent state of Penn’s world.

The word at the core of the quote is, of course, “love,” but for me, it's “then” that is most telling.

Let us ... then ... try what love will do.

It suggests that because we have tried everything else and failed, let’s “then” give love a last-gasp chance. (John Lennon invoked similar words regarding peace. “All we are saying is give peace a chance”).

Penn’s insertion of “then” is also more understandable when the aphorism is placed in context. Here’s where the sentence appears in “The Fruits of Solitude.”

“We are too ready to retaliate, rather than forgive, or gain by Love and Information. And yet we could hurt no Man that we believe loves us. Let us then try what Love will do: For if Men did once see we Love them, we should soon find they would not harm us. Force may subdue, but Love gains....”

The next time you watch a political ad, or hear news from Syria or the West Bank, or witness poverty and strife here, consider Penn’s words:

Let us then try what love will do.


A final note: Penn’s Philadelphia was named, and the city today remains known as, “The City of Brotherly Love.” The name is derived from the Greek words for love and brother.

The story of love’s successes and failures in Philadelphia is a parable worth studying.

The photos here are of the Quaker Arch Street Meetinghouse in Philadelphia.