There is something fitting that this date in history would be momentous. That August 20th would, in 1858 usher in the modern world and eight years later close our bloodiest chapter.

Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species was published 156 years ago today. The work is credited, as we know, with the birth and popularizing of the scientific concept of evolution. It also ushered in the modern era. The era of great scientific discovery that escalated beyond the Enlightenment and brought crashing down the archaic beliefs about the world as a permanent, unchanging place throughout time.

The discovery and explanation of evolution leads directly to Einstein, half a century later, discovering further truths about the world and about our pipe dream of stability. The discovery of entropy further arrested the human fiction that we are as GOD created long ago: and that we may always be the same. That the world can plateau and achieve a stasis. That we could ever be tomorrow exactly as we are today.

But we can’t. We grow. Or we decline. We never stay the same.

Considering also the violence, built by race and fear, occurring throughout the world (in alphabetical order Gaza, Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine), each displaying not only deep ideological divides, but even deeper racial discord and even systemic racism, it seems auspicious that we should also acknowledge today the end of the Civil War 148 years ago. Our own internal conflict, deeply racial and disturbingly revealing, is typified by the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the inept police response to the case of his death, and the militarized response to the protests over that response. We are living in one long period of trouble with race. Not one begun by the Civil War, nor one that the War ended. The injustice of slavery was replaced by separate and unequal and Jim Crow.

Only days before Michael Brown, it was John Crawford, the good guy with the (toy) gun: shot and killed by police in a Wal-Mart while talking on the phone. Days before, then days before, and ever days before was another. Ever more.

The evils of racism didn’t end nearly a century and a half ago because the War is not about racism directly. Slavery, yes. My time in the South taught me that. It isn’t even the Civil War down there. It’s The War of Northern Aggression.

So the War isn’t about race (apparently) but about rights, property, and who gets to say which is which. By virtue of losing, that right went to the federal government of the United States, rather than the Confederate States. States don’t get the right to choose for themselves who gets to be property.

It only took another century for us to codify that African-Americans are fully human.

Maybe today, the day the world gave birth to modernism, will be the day in which we usher in a new revelation. A day in which we finally bring racism to an end and wrestle with our  part, all of us, with the continued violence and dehumanizing nature of our relationships. That we bring an end to the suffering and fear and selfishness of the modern condition.

Perhaps today we might prove that we have, in fact, evolved in the last century and a half.