This past weekend I visited B*ATL, a weekend commemoration of the 147th anniversary of the Battle of Atlanta. It wasn't a long trip, my intown neighborhood was actually built over the battleground, but it proved an eye-opening event.

Now, I'm very much a son of the South, being raised in rural NC, and then spending thirty years in Atlanta. So I'm well versed in the "War of Northern Aggression." However, it's probably more accurate to take a line from Henry Grady's famous speech and say that I'm more a son of the New South. That would be the Atlanta, often referred to as the "City too Busy to Hate" where intown coffee shops are filled with an eclectic mix of community activists, bloggers, and renaissance rednecks. Where you see pretty much every race and national origin, age, and sexual preference represented. Especially in my intown neighborhood of East Atlanta Village. An old intown trolley neighborhood that's gone from Indian trails, to pioneer trade route, its seen colonial times, to statehood, to witnessing civil war, then reconciliation, growth and development, to white flight, to neglect, to civil rights movement, to gentrification - you name it, this area's been in the heart of it all.

Now I've been to a couple of civil war reenactments/celebrations before, mainly in Eastern TN visiting relatives, and back home in Eastern NC (Battle of Bentonville). I have to admit, that even I am at times uneasy. When I go to a renaissance festival I never really felt threatened even by the black knight, realizing it was all for play. Civil war reenactors get into it a bit too much. There also that feeling in the story telling tents, and talking to soldiers, that there's a real nostalgia for those simpler times. Almost a romanticism about how things were back then and just how much it reflected the "true" South. You know, simple Christian folks, working with their hands and tilling the soil, men were men and women were women, and when things got busy on the farm - well at least you had all those slaves to help out - yeah, those were the good ole days.

This was all brought to bear as I visited the recent Battle of Atlanta Celebration this past weekend. A celebration known now as just the hip moniker B*ATL. It features such ole timey civil war type stuff as a 5K run, as well as the history tours, cemetery tours, and of course your obligatory civil war reenactors dressed in those hot wool suits and firing off a surprisingly loud cannon every hour. You also get to see how women spun wool and how doctors hacked off legs in the medical tent. It was a surreal moment though to be walking through the tents and seeing the group of homeless men sitting off in the back, obviously wondering when this would all be over and they could have their park back.

Now what's amazing about this whole celebration, is that it's become not so much a civil war reenactment but a neighborhood festival, and one that is surprisingly multi-cultural. This isn't history as nostalgia, but history in it's role in understanding our own lives. This in a city that's home to Martin Luther King Jr. but still a city that still sweats under the collar when it comes to race issues. A city that when they chose to build a museum to that great romantic icon of the civil war "Gone With the Wind" people tried to burn it down twice before it even opened, yet now it's a major literary institution hosting literary events for authors like Pearl Cleage. That is the beauty of Atlanta, where we often can recognize our past, flaws and all, and not forget it, not gloss over it, but incorporate it in our lives and move on.

I spent a good part of Saturday afternoon at the festival, in one of the local libraries, where I heard a professional African American story teller, spin stories based on a real local slave's life. I heard a local performance artist do a one-man, 20-minute very gay version of Gone with the Wind, he even imagines part of movie with alternative castings of Bette Davis and Katherine Hepburn. I don't think I would have seen either of these at traditional reenactments back home in rural NC.

So it begs the question, are progressive southerners now able to see the civil war through the long lens of history, without the traditional animosities, racial divisions and uneasiness that usually goes with these events? I was struck at how so many events drew a crowd of suburbanites, yankee transplants, intown creatives, African Americans, even same sex couples, all listening to these stories and taking everything in. Part of the strength of this festival is that it does try to tell everyone's story, not just glorifying the war, and romanticizing the era, but telling the stories of devastated families, the shame of slavery, and not hiding the sheer magnitude and gruesomeness of this battle (over 12,000 dead). This is war as meat grinder. And yet these are our forefathers, who for better or worse, went to battle for a cause they believed in. One they felt noble at the time, and though the civil war almost tore this young country apart, and left us with regional animosities, and racial tensions, it is indeed part of our history. I felt oddly proud over the weekend as I enjoyed all this, fanning myself in the Atlanta summer with my B*ATL church fan (photo above), that though yes, things aren't perfect, but we've come a long way.