Lieutenant Alonzo Cushing will be awarded a Medal of Honor today for his heroism at the Battle of Gettysburg. Why did it take so long? Well, there are several reasons, most of them prosaic. (Initially, the rules did not allow posthumous awards, and Cushing was killed in the battle; there was bureaucratic inertia.) There’s also the fact that the white South still hasn’t come to grips with the Civil War:
Mr. Kind [a sponsor for Cushing’s Medal of Honor] said some Southern colleagues were also less than enthusiastic. “There was some resistance to awarding a Union soldier the congressional medal at Gettysburg even 150 years after the fact,” Mr. Kind said.
If you’re wondering how long it’s going to take the South to stop letting its poor people suffer and die for lack of medical care rather than accept free Medicaid money, the answer is: probably a long time.
