I took this picture today [ed: yesterday, but this was the post that was giving me trouble], as we stopped by the Manassas Battlefield State Park. The exact location is a bit past the cross between Highway 29 and Sudley Road. It’s about a mile to the east of Bull Run– a small stream that is part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
You know what is a little odd?
Apparently, what the North called one battle, the South called another. So it is with the battles of Manassas or Bull Run– Bull Run being the aforementioned creek that marks the eastern border of the battlefield area and Manassas being the town closest to it.
Looking south from this point,and with the entire state park slowly surrounded on all sides by huge, cookie-cutter developments and cut in half by a busy road and by the Lee highway, I can’t help but wonder exactly how much has truly changed since those times when brother fought brother.
Have people forgotten just how much blood was shed on those low hills, and for what reason?
Because it seems that when the main reason the land around this battlefield is sacrificed is to create bloated, gated communities for the affluent –to segregate themselves from the rest of the world– the carnage of all those Americans less than two hundred years ago seems pretty senseless.
But then I know that the world has, in fact, changed. And suddenly the south just looks like another point in the compass.
A Daily Dose of Zen Sarcasm! 
I first learned about the two names of that battlefield from an Encyclopedia Brown story I read back in the third grade. In any case, a gated community near the site just seems to be so many kinds of wrong…
If you’re interested in doing something about this, you can donate to the Civil War Preservation Trust (http://www.civilwar.org/). We donated to a campaign a year or so ago that ended up purchasing some battlefield land in Manassas that was up for sale. The best way to fight this isn’t by protesting against the builders — it’s by helping preservationists buy the land in question.