7 October 2010 watching memories of a bad battle

The document I saved earlier this morning vanished into the great ether like the last SOS from a sinking ship in the Antarctic waters. I’ve been fighting a rapidly deteriorating computer for a month, hoping that I could reverse the boot problems and find some way to convince the mother board not to suicide.

The ability to write and have it saved is important to me. How else am I to be able to deliver diatribes, write radical rants, and annoy others who might, once, expect to find some logic, reality, reason, compassion or empathy in the things I post. Without these marvelous little laptop computers we’re relegated to the prior methods of type writers, carbon paper, multiple copies, erasures, white-out and pools of secretaries pounding away at keyboards to publish our thoughts. So finding that the document I so carefully saved this morning is not on my hard drive is disturbing.

There was no great message in what I had saved this morning. So other than to my ego, no harm took place.

Gettysburg PA 1863 The nation and the Confederate states threw thousands of American soldiers into a brutal and crucial battle on the first three days of July.

Colllins showed the Ken Burns Civil War segment on Gettysburg this morning.

When we visited the battlefield at Gettysburg it was one of the most troubling places I have ever been in this hemisphere. I grew up playing in the residual trenches dug by Union troops around Jefferson City MO. I’ve walked battlefields at Wilson’s Creek, at Pilot Knob, and other places where men marched shoulder to shoulder into cannon and massed rifles. Only Gettysburg tore at my soul. It’s one of those places where anyone who has ever been in the army can look at the terrain and know how badly the dice have fallen.

To see the photographs and drawings from those three days, to hear the commentary and the old letters and journal entries, is to increase the understanding one can gain from reviewing the words of the people who were there because they had to be. To watch the video, see the images, and have the sound-track of artillery and rifle fire over laying the images was very hard to sit through this morning. As I said, Gettysburg tore at my soul. That’s one of those wounds that will take a long time to close. I don’t really know why, just that it will.

Dinner tonight – Fried rice with shrimp and leftover roasts pork. Quite delicious.

I’ve saved this four different times. I hope it takes this time.

Watch this site for coming distractions.