As usual, here are a few of the Christmas cards I received this year. In order, they are from the President, Sen. Jim Webb, State Sen. Louise Lucas, Del. Lionell Spruill, Sr. and Councilman Tommy Smigiel.
One card I did not receive but which was scanned and forwarded to me is that from Del. Joe Morrissey, shown below. This is one you’ll definitely want to enlarge and read 🙂
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
My mom, Celeste Beane Cooper, never apologized for her father being a Confederate veteran, but she gave more emphasis to the fact that he worked hard after the Civil War to send several of his children to college—at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg and Randolph-Macon College in Ashland. She gave me the impression that providing education for his children was my grandfather’s greatest accomplishment. This he did while pursuing several occupations, including farmer, small hotel operator, and timber man. He had a large family to feed, clothe, and educate — a significant challenge in rural Virginia, after the economic devastation of the Civil War. Clearly, my grandfather did not make a practice of looking backward in those challenging times.
My mother, a public school teacher, taught her students—and her son—to treat others’ beliefs with respect—whether we agreed with them or not. She had little time for rationalization about what happened in the war of 1861-65. She believed it was unwise to permit attitudes left over from the Civil War to stir up conflict among people, over a hundred years after the war was over. She became even more committed to equality after World War II, a conflict in which people from both races in Lancaster County fought side by side for America’s freedom. She believed that all who fought deserved to benefit from the freedom for which they had risked their lives.
She taught me to respect the past, but not to dwell there. Rather, she encouraged me to look ahead in my search for opportunities. I see now that my mother passed on to me what she had learned from her father—chiefly that living in the past was not an option. She encouraged me to look beyond the Confederate monument across the street as a symbol and to search instead for a new perspective on the world and my place in it.
In an earlier time, small towns and cities in the South had built memorials to their fallen heroes, such as Lancaster County, Virginia’s Confederate Monument. Communities in the North built their own memorials, for equally good reasons. She would be disappointed to learn that our country, 150 years after the most devastating war we ever fought, is again divided along the lines of race, creeds and economic opportunities.
To those who cling to Civil War mottos such as “Forget, hell,” I believe my mother would say, “Get an education! No one can take that from you.” That’s the message her students and I heard in the 1950s, and it served me well throughout my own career of forty years in education. You can’t beat education, especially if it’s focused on the future.