Living in a Parallelogram

“It is well that war is so terrible – otherwise we should grow too fond of it.” ~ Gen. Lee at the Battle of Fredericksburg

It’s been happening a lot lately. At first, very close to home and then further away. I’ve found parallels to modern dilemmas in my own writing and promoted those themes in my books in every way imaginable from cultural norms to political fetishes. Perhaps that’s not so astounding as I tend to write historical fiction. But I’ve certainly recognized that penchant for highlighting the parallels between our times now and ‘those times then’ in many more literary works lately. I wonder if that’s because we feel so stressed and pushed out of our comfort zones today. We grasp likenesses of situations from earlier times that somehow were survived by our ancestors in hope of feeling the assurance that we, too, can survive.

I’ve noticed this sense of déjà vu particularly strongly in a book I’m reading currently. I do highly recommend it, not as particularly light summer fare but as a poignant reminder of what the United States has struggled through and survived in times that some of our own relatives lived through—namely the buildup to the Civil War with the dissolution of the Union. The book is Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest, and one cannot read it seriously without drawing numerous parallels to our own times, as the author clearly wants us to do. I admit I’ve renamed the book in my own mind, The Demon of Discontent, because I’ve been struck by how the atmosphere of disaffection and restlessness expanded almost before it was recognized into the catastrophe of hatred that became the ether of war. One cannot miss recognizing the polarization of the country at that time so obviously replicated in our country today.

But what do we do with the recognition of the parallels? The opposite or facing sides of a parallelogram are of equal length and the opposite angles of a parallelogram are of equal measure, but what do we do with that knowledge? Surely the use we make of the identification of likeness is more important than its detection. In other words, so what? Surely we need to use the knowledge for some greater purpose. In Larson’s book we’re struck over and over by how close the country came to breaking apart, only to pull itself back from the brink of ruin to continue the plan our Founding Fathers had begun a century before. How could we have learned so little, I kept thinking, when we’ve been here before? Identifying that same roadmap is not enough. We must do something with it, and we all should spend some time living with these past parallels in order to understand the importance of their lessons.

You may think you know more than you want to about our Civil War, but I urge you to read Larson’s book to fully appreciate how we got there in the first place, because it’s so much how we got here. And oddly, there were many things that come out of the book that either weren’t well taught in my American History courses, or were just passed over completely. For example, the surprise attack on Fort Sumpter which most of us were told marked the start of the conflict wasn’t a surprise at all. Any more than most of what’s going on in our society is a revelation. If you like learning new things, pick up The Demon of Unrest. Oddly enough, you may find the parallels affirming, as they give you a GPS for navigating today’s unrest. And looking at the parallel lines of the American flag with those red and white stripes, I’m reminded to take nothing for granted.