Magnanimity

Barack Obama famously said a few days before the 2008 general election...."We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." We lost that election....kept our heads....and went back to work....won the House in 2010....kept it in 2012.....and won both the House and Senate in 2014....as Donald Trump was still busy with The Apprentice. The following was posted about a month after Barack Obama had defeated John McCain. I thought I would bring it back today....election day 2020. What has changed today in that you cannot lose an election.....and then just dig in to win the next one? Are we transformed as a nation....and if so in what ways....and how did this come about?

Magnanimity.....December 11, 2008   

           As I remember it, the story goes like this; The Civil War's end had begun at Appomattox Courthouse when General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to General Grant. The Confederate Army was filing by Union troops and laying down their weapons. Their heads were down as the anguish of defeat and a lost cause stripped them of everything they held dear. General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain stood in the Union ranks and saw the once proud army that had fought with honor....in what he believed was the wrong cause....but their cause nonetheless. He then committed an act of magnanimity that was in line with what we have come to know of Chamberlain. He commanded his Union troops to attention with the purpose of giving this beaten enemy a measure of honor that their acts of bravery and obedience to their cause deserved. The Confederates were astonished by this. They stood up tall and continued to file by and leave their weapons....but now with a little bit of hope restored that the future might acknowledge their efforts.
          Lincoln showed magnanimity towards the south in the short time he lived after its defeat. John Wilkes Booth struck out in murderous hate because of the South's defeat....and the North eventually showed little magnanimity towards the south in Reconstruction....thus many laid Jim Crow laws on this doorstep.
         Enormous amounts of money were spent in rebuilding Europe.....including West Germany after World War II, as well as magnanimity given towards Japan that proved wise in how Japan eventually progressed to where it is today. Many historians believe that a lack of magnanimity towards Germany at the end of World War I gave Hitler what he needed to enslave the minds of his followers. Stalin and Mao were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions after their...."victories."
        We are in a culture war in America right now and one side or the other may win it. If this new liberal, this progressive secular leftist element wins and decides to once and for all to rid America of religious myth and tradition, it will lead to disaster. If the conservative, the Bible Thumper, the family values element (of which I am one) wins, and if we fail to recognize that our conservatism can be greed, our Bible thumping can be pride, and our family values can be smokescreens, then this also will lead to disaster. Should the Lord give us any victories in life, may He give us discernment to see when magnanimity is called for.