In Tennessee, where presumably everyone has a job and enough food to eat, the House of White People's Representatives just passed a law making it harder to remove statues of Confederate generals or rename streets named after Confederate heroes.

It's winter, and the poor people of Tennessee can have all the ice water they want. That simple statement reminds me of the Civil War, when boys we would think of as college-aged lay wounded on battlefields for days, crying for water. Then, they died.

The Civil War wasn't one of those inconclusive, Vietnam-type wars. It was over when it was over. The Confederacy gave up, surrendered, chucked in the towel, quit, couldn't take any more, went belly up and cried "uncle." They lost.

Southern states stayed in the Union. The slaves were freed.

The preservation of the Union came about because the Confederacy lost the war. They lost. They lost, and they didn't come back for a second try because they lost so convincingly.

There's that word again. Lost. The Confederacy lost the war. They surrendered.

And I'm happy about that because slavery was a horror and splitting the Union to save slavery or states' rights was a horrible idea.

The losers of that war didn't want to fight any more but they didn't want to give up a flag made meaningless by surrender, so they built statues of the guys on the losing side wherever they could. And that very southern town was soon graced by a statue of General Whuppem T. Lynchrope, a justifiably famous man who lost, whose army surrendered, whose country ceased to exist but will not go away.

And what's left are the flags and the statues cast and carried by the side that lost, and the grubby little grabbing for votes that still animates the self-proclaimed descendants of those men who lost the war.

It's a dirty little game, dishonoring the noble dead by pretending to fight a war they themselves quit. Say what you want about the noble warriors of the South's Lost Cause, they knew when they'd had enough, when flesh would bear no more, when to end the fighting and the dying and the starving.

The hands of the men who really fought the war took the flag down at the end, surrendered their guns, gave it up and went home to whatever was left at home. They wanted it to be over so much that they surrendered. They had to be sure the other side knew they were done. The stories got made up later, when no one was afraid of dying anymore.

I say leave the statues of the Confederate generals right where they've always been, as a way to remember the honored dead and those who quit in the end. And next to each Confederate statue, erect a statue of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a way to remember the honored dead and those who never quit.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, "Marc Dion Vol. I" is a collection of his best 2014 columns and is available for Nook and Kindle.

Photo credit: