January 1, 2002

2002: Year of unfinished business

Through A Glass Darkly, by John Myers, Internet Photojournalist

Well, we've survived 2001, now what? I am quite sure that this past year will forever be etched in the American psyche, one of those years that will instantly evoke painful memories in any and all who lived through it, not only in America but worldwide.

If I may repeat a thought stolen from another scribe, 2001 will join the ranks of such painful recent landmarks as 1963, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; and 1941, the year of Pearl Harbor and America's shoved entry into World War II.

I would add 1861, but will also have to explain to the young among us that was the beginning of the Civil War. A fairly recent survey of 17-year-old Americans found a whopping number could not guess the years of the Civil War within a decade.

I didn't live through that one, but as William Faulkner said, in the South, history isn't past. I am a true Southerner in that sense, influenced by my father's stories of his grandfather, John Shepherd Myers of Anson County, NC, who was a Civil War veteran.

Daddy told stories of his grandfather and other surviving members of the Myers clan boiling the ashes of the smokehouse where the hams were cured to get enough salt to cure a ham.

Salt only cost a nickel a bag, but few had a nickel in those years after the Civil War in Anson County. Gen. William T. Sherman's famous march to the sea to destroy the commerce of the South came through Anson County, and what few possessions the Myers clan had went up in smoke as he passed.

And the smokehouses where the hams were cured were nothing but piles of salty ashes after the passing of Sherman.

No wonder that my father often said -- probably not entirely in jest -- that he was 21 before he found out "damn Yankee" is two words. My great-grandfather John, for whom I am named, died when my father was 18, but growing up with him in the household greatly influenced not only my father, but me also.

I have never looked up the Civil War record of my forebears, but according to my father, several of great-grandpa John's brothers also served in the Confederate army and perished.

When the war was over, John S. Myers was only 13 and had been fighting for two years, daddy told me. No doubt that family heritage has led me to read and collect many Civil War books.

I recently learned one of great-grandpa John's brothers moved to Cheraw, S.C., after the war and I have several cousins there.

But before I hear from the Chamber of Commerce about my belligerent attitude about Yankees, let me say I subscribe to the enlightened attitude about Northerners learned from more than a decade of living and working in Moore County, the land of Pinehurst, Southern Pines and other Northern relocation areas.

As the natives of Moore say, a Yankee is one of the many tourists who come to Pinehurst, play golf, spend money and go home. A "damn Yankee" is one who comes South and stays.

But somehow, after surviving 2001, the Mason-Dixon and other dividing lines in America don't seem so definite anymore.

As I wrote in an earlier column, borrowing a phrase often repeated after Sept. 11, "We're all New Yorkers now." If 2001 has done nothing more, it has made us a nation of Americans more than we ever have been before, bound together in the crucible of a national disaster like few we have known before.

Perhaps the upheaval is not as wrenching as the years 1861-65, but it's close. Let us hope and pray that in 2002 we can follow President Abraham Lincoln's guidance in that great war.

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

First on the list of unfinished business: Osama bin Laden. Then we can see about a just and lasting peace.