Open Wounds

(fm the BC thread "Speeches without words")

A year and a half ago I shared my opinion on what to do with the WTC site on LGF but saved it to my blog,
My 2¢'s worth. Build Three towers two of 100 stories each, one of 120.
First the Tower of Justice and Liberty, for government and legal tenants.
Second the Tower of Hope and Wisdom, with a Hospital and University.
Third the Tower of Freedom and Commerce, for entrepreneurs and artists.

Make the first 40 stories residential. Accept no delays and get it built!

My refinement would be to move the UN to Governor's Island, so it would always be in the sight of the middle tower.

mongoose,
There are times where I disagree with you and I understand the temptation that some have to question whether the cost we paid to end slavery was worth the damage done to the federal system. That is I understand it but disagree with them. On this one I am with you.

The costs of the Civil War and the resultant centralization of power and debasement of the states is solely the fault of the oligarchs of ant-bellum South Carolina and those leaders in the other southern states who knew better but failed to stop secession. If Virginia had stayed in the Union then North Carolina would have stayed in. There was at least a chance that given the real affection for the Union across large tracts of the South that the Confederacy might have peacefully imploded. We will never know. Some argue that slavery could not have been ended peacefully but I suspect that the plantations were going to fail anyway and the probability of ending the practice might have been near. The need to address the status of slavery and the impossibility of enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, which was cited in the Acts of Secession, was thorny and would have still left a legacy of bitterness on all sides. It is hard to argue that such an alternative would not have been better than 600,000 Americans dead and a century of bitterness and poverty.

All that said the South chose the War and Lincoln properly fought it with one goal in mind, restoring the Union. John Wilkes Booth did the South no favor when he killed Lincoln. The Constitutional issues should not remain frozen in time but should be addressed. The Confederate Constitution was an interesting document. There are ideas in it worthy of consideration or at least useful in stimulating debate. The quality of the construction of the subsequent 14th Amendment to the Federal Constitution has produced mischief. Like the Commerce clause the Citizenship clause and the Due Process clause, both in section 1, have proven to elastic and subject to abuse by those in Congress and the Courts seeking to centralize power. We now face the possible abuse of the Apportionment clause in section 2.