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Edited on Fri May-26-06 09:50 AM by rateyes
Monday is Memorial Day. It’s the holiday each year, celebrated on the last Monday in May, to remind us of those who gave their lives in service to our nation. It used to be called Decoration Day, because people would go (as some still do) to the graves of Americans who were killed in battle and decorate them with our country’s flag as well as flowers and other items. Tomorrow, as is tradition, the person who occupies the Oval Office will go to Arlington Cemetery and place a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns…a memorial that is there to remind us of the terrible price of war and the enormous cost of securing the blessings of liberty.
Memorials are important. As the word implies, memorials are used to remind us of important people and/or events. Memorials come in all shapes, sizes and forms, and are everywhere we go. In fact, some memorials are so commonplace that we forget that they are, in fact, memorials. We see them—monuments or other symbols designed to evoke a memory—and, we don’t remember, at least we don’t remember to the extent that we should remember.
Some memorials, by the way, are being hidden from us in the hopes that we won’t “remember.” The flag-draped coffins coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan are memorials to the lies that we have been told by those who have broken their pledge to “protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic."
A memorial is erected, not only for those erecting it to help them remember---but, also to TEACH lessons to those who come later who were not there to see the event or to know the person for whom the memorial stands. That’s why we should be allowed to see those flag-draped coffins. But, I digress.
I’ll never forget as a child of about 10 years of age, standing inside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. looking into the stone face of the giant man sitting in that chair, and walking out from that building looking in the same direction Lincoln faces and seeing that grand spire that almost touches the sky, named after the first U.S. President and seeing the flags of the various states which encircle that monument….and, then seeing to the right across the water a circular building honoring the man who authored the Virginia Statue for Religious Liberty, which became the basis for the Constitution’s first amendment’s protection guaranteeing the separation of church and state, as well as the Declaration of Independence.
I had heard about those men in school. I didn’t know much about them…but, seeing those memorials made me want to learn more about them. And as I did learn more about them, and had the opportunity to go back a second time years later, seeing those memorials again filled me with a sense of awe and wonder at the sacrifices that those men, and other men and women who are memorialized on that mall, made to secure and protect the blessings of liberty that many of us take for granted.
None of us here today were alive during the times of Washington and Jefferson, and Lincoln. But, yet, when we see those memorials we REMEMBER them, don’t we? Or rather, we REMEMBER THE LESSONS they and their contemporaries, both men and women, taught us as those lessons were passed on to us from generation to generation---memories kept alive, in part, by the memorials that stand in their honor.
Each and every year, thousands upon thousands of school children walk that mall in Washington D.C. on class field-trips. They see the monuments to great people, to bloody battles, to human achievement, and to unknown heroes. They are taken there to impress upon them the lessons of history.
That’s the main reason for memorials…to TEACH THE CHILDREN the history of their people.
And, since that is the case: I want to ask a simple question of you today. “What memorials are we establishing for our children, today?” What is it that we are leaving behind in our wake that will speak of who we are, what we did, and what trials we overcame? And, when our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren ask their parents what they mean, will the remembrances be good or bad? Will the lessons taught be honorable ones? For, you see, we erect memorials to both the good and the bad. Yes, we have a Washington Monument. But, we also have a U.S.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. Yes, we have Mt. Rushmore. But, we also have empty chairs in another park where the Murrah Federal Building once stood in Oklahoma City. And, today the statue that we call “Lady Liberty” looks across the waters to a memorial being built at Ground Zero.
Will the memorials we build as one generation of Americans speak of love or hate, war or peace, justice or injustice, inclusion or exclusion, division or unity, building up the nation or tearing it apart?
Make no mistake, our history is being written, carved in stone and left behind for all the future generations to read…and someday, a long time from now, someone will read that history and make judgments about whether or not we lived up to our self-proclaimed title as the “greatest nation on earth.” Our grandchildren will judge us by our history we write and the legacy they inherit from us. From the memorials we leave behind for them, what lessons will they learn?
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