Man's Inhumanity

One of the Andersonville POWs at the end of the war.

It was a perfect day to visit Andersonville Prison in the back roads of southwestern Georgia. The drizzling, dreary day was the backdrop to this terrible place. For it was here that the Confederate Army created a POW camp for Yankee prisoners during the Civil War. It was here, in this 26.5 acres of open land with a filthy, bacteria-laden stream running through it, that 45,000 Union soldiers were incarcerated. And 13,000 of them died of disease or starvation.
We came here not to be uplifted, but to feel the pain of war and man's inhumanity to man. This terrible place now is a National Historic Site. It contains a museum honoring all POWs. This, on its own, is a bit overwhelming since it adds layers upon layer to the horrors we and others have perpetrated.
But it forces us, again, to confront our terrible history.

“My heart aches for these poor retches, Yankees though they are, and I am afraid God will suffer some terrible retribution to fall upon us for letting such things happen. If the Yankees should ever come to southwest Georgia and go to Anderson and see the graves there, God have mercy on the land!”
A Southern woman who climbed
a guard tower and looked down upon
the stockade in 1864.

The Southern captain who was in charge of the prison was hanged in Washington after the end of the war. His explanation: “I was following orders.”

Thirty miles away is Plains, Georgia, the home of President Jimmy Carter. We drove down there after lunch and spent time in the Peanut store and in the Plains High School that now is another historic site where Carter is honored. His brother, Billy, had a gas station in town and it has been turned into a museum. Billy died back in the 1980s.
Before we headed here – just 100 miles north of the Florida border, we stopped off in Atlanta to visit the CNN headquarters. I remember when CNN started back in 1980. My how it has grown. Even though CNN is not doing well in the ratings (coming in behind Fox and MSNBC among the 24-hour cable operations) it still is an impressive place to visit. We toured the multiple studios and our guide even took us to a mockup of a weather studio where we could see how the green screen works. He used three youngsters for the demonstration and made them disappear on screen when he placed a green cloth over them. The class clown, of course, had to raise his hand above the cloth and it appeared on the weather map as a disembodied hand.
CNN's International network had anchor studios in Atlanta, London and Hong Kong so they can track with the sun. CNN en Espanol is a massive enterprise, all in Spanish, whereas the International feeds are dubbed into around 40 different languages. All of this came spinning out of the brain of Ted Turner who conceived of the notion of have news 24 hours a day.