Old Town Alexandria

I took a trip to Old Town Alexandria yesterday. Very charming, lots of old buildings, lots of newer buildings made to look like old buildings. Looking at them, it is difficult to imagine the lives that were led by the people who lived there in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. But then I saw this statue, a soldier gazing toward the south, as the plaque reads, toward the places where his comrades fell during the War Between the States. It is erected on the spot from which in 1861 the Confederates fled the occupying Union Army to join the rebel forces.

Alexandria is also the boyhood home of Robert E Lee, the son of Harry "Light Horse" Lee, who was a hero of the American Revolution and a Governor of Virginia.

What does it mean that Robert E Lee, who served in the US Army for 32 years before he took up arms against it, was not tried for treason and shot after the war, and that he is venerated today? What does it mean that this statue honoring those who fell seeking to preserve a society based on the right to own other human beings retains its place a short subway ride from the Capitol?

I know that I can't help but think that like those who put up this statue, the members of the Tea Party and their ilk are longing for a lost world, one that if it ever existed, can never exist again, and that a key part of that world is that its benefits belong to "people like us" not "people like them."