Each Nation has its Ghosts
How many nations are there in the world? I think there are hundreds and hundreds. Like, in the United States alone, we have quite a few. There are the normal predominant American types, who fit the standard categories, like White Anglo Saxon Protestants, or Catholics from Ireland, but there are also the Hidatsa and the Arikara, the Cheyenne and the Sioux, and on and on. Seminoles. The Lumbee. The Pamunkey. The Matonai.
There are the sub-nations of immigrants that are among us in the United States, and Canada, and Mexico. The Amish, the Mennonites, the Church of the Brethren of Christ. Mini-nations of folks surrounded by greater political boundaries of official sovereign nations.
There are many other lands around the planet with their respective nations and peoples. The islands, of the Pacific, the Caribbean, both vast Indies of the tropics the great expanses of China, or Mongolia, or Russia and Kazakhstan, and on and on upon the steppes and plains, into the massive taiga and tundra from international boundary to the next river and sea and ocean. From Arctic peninsula to narrow isthmus, the folks with their own language, traditions, ways of life, and lore.
Whole nations apart.
Each of us have our spirits, our kindred dead, the ancestors that we have buried or forgotten, that we have lauded or lambasted. Or those who have past away from us long ago, or last year, who we simply allowed to seep away in the mists of time. But and however: their ghosts remain. Their vesigThey are still there, haunting or blessing or reminding or keeping vigil upon the living, or their co-deceased.
Spirits, ghosts, demons, ghouls, poltergeists, and guardian angels. The whole gamut.
In the United States we have the hundreds of thousands of Civil War dead. Many men, and a few women and children were sacrificed for those causes in the 1860s. Lincoln was another casualty of it, within a few days of the official treaty of the final signings of surrender, in south-central Virginia, the Commonwealth of much death and destruction, we have our own shares of the dead spirits bopping around.
Most of us to not sense them, or remember them, or even think much of them.
There was the 15-year-old who drowned in the river in Clarke County during the forgotten battle there. They never found his body? I think not. But his spirit goes on somewhere. Perhaps he was from Ohio, and he traipses around there?
Many men, on both sides, suffered and died, never to return to their homes in the flesh. But their memories and spirits moved on. Where did they go? Perhaps more go to the next life, not to swell the ranks of the ghosts here. Are there phantoms or kind presences, auras of persons who have come and gone? Mass graves were assembled where thousands were left unnamed. Tombs of the unknown and less remembered. Tabulated by those who won and lost, at minimum. At least.
They are not visible or noticed like the living. Their remains and bones may continue in some places of prominence, but mostly all of them are hidden away, some in books and stories, if fortunate enough to be mentioned on a placard or monument, or a tomb, or within a story of heroism or travail.
Most are nameless and faceless. And they are no longer here, and they are invisible.
Fair. Or, as atheists have it, their souls had purchase while their hearts beat and their lungs rose, but no more since their last expired movements of cellular existence. The hair follicles grow on the bodies of some dead, but that hardly counts as existing as a person. They have moved on, whether as a soul or not.
Some transfer of energy, knowledge, personality, and identity has transpired. Violent or sad endings befell so many in that half decade of the 1860s. In our one nation here. These happenings have played out thousands of times over the world round, backward through the eons.
Our Civil War dead and survivors are but one piece of that puzzle.
Lincoln paid them tribute, as many of us do still. And should, always.
Their ghosts remain, and even speak to some of us.
The Chinese have many more ghosts than our nation. Maybe Britain does too, based on their longer history? We early Americans contributed to some of their lost troops, the once and forever Red Coats. More Brits have perished in southern Iraq or in certain stations of Afghanistan, in this the latest century.
Each nation with its haunting and surveilling souls. Especially the ones that did not age out as the normal course of things, but found their lives ending precipitously and precociously. These were not natural causes that took their last thoughts and feelings, and physical functions, these family and friends removed from their associations, but an act of another, be it a bullet or artillery shell, a bayonet, or some gross infection, or maybe the malaria other sickness that aggrieve the troops on their military bivouacs, like Brandy Station. Was it Brandy Junction? Or which was it, not far from here? Hundreds took sick and died before one shot was fired, thanks to the stingers of the pesty mosquitos. Better to suffer the freezing cold and rain than that fate, methinks.
Yes, the ghosts remain: to complain, to remind, to console, to scare, to sober up, to awaken, to rekindle, to hearten. To terrify? Maybe a little of that. To sadden, to make wistful, sure.
And what of the millions of Chinese, or the Russians, or the Germans, or the Jewish, or the people called Aztecs, which was not their real name but another one affixed?
What of them? What of the Egyptians, dead and gone? Not just the royalty, but the slaves and masses.
The slaves and masses. Do their lives and legacies linger?
The ghosts and angels of all the peoples, our collective families.
Nation upon nation. Yours, mine, and theirs.
Filipinos, Vietnamese, Norwegians, Icelanders, and the Inuit. The aboriginal of Australia and the Mapuche of Chile. All of them, from nation to nation, cross blending their ghosts to us today.
We feel them, or ignore them, at our own peril or gain.
