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Friday, March 29, 2024

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“Saving the memorials to war dead”

Mary Wakefield Buxton

by Mary Wakefield Buxton – 

URBANNA —

Suppose a group of “offended” Americans demand the removal of all memorials and statues that honor soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War?

Sound preposterous? Maybe not. In today’s society where it’s acceptable to destroy or move to far pastures anything that offends anybody, this supposition is not so very outlandish. Who knows what the future will bring to our present day offense prone society?

I have a personal interest in saving monuments that honor our war dead. My husband served on a ship that delivered supplies to troops fighting in Vietnam during his 1960s stint in the U.S. Navy making me an ex-Navy wife. He spent months on duty keeping watch in the South China Sea on the USS Mars delivering supplies.

Our generation suffered greatly from that war that lost more than 50,000 Americans. I want to make sure our society always honors those who gave their lives in that tragic effort.

Military service changes perspective. One can see up close the big picture, how all wars are tragic and how little the everyday soldier has in the say of why or how wars are fought. All a soldier can do is follow the course of his leaders and hope for the best.

History tells us what grave mistakes our leaders have made waging war. Their faulty decisions have cost the lives and well- being of many hundreds and thousands of Americans sent to battle. The least we can do is remember them.

Yet in a free society anything can happen. One day some Americans that sympathize with communist agenda for state control over all facets of life may demand that all monuments to those that fought and killed Vietnamese communists be taken down, moved or destroyed. We saw this behavior with Confederate monuments remembering war dead, why not with other wars?

Who knows? One day mobs could be offended by World War I or II monuments, Spanish American War, Mexican War, U.S. Cavalry action against Native Americans in the West, even the Revolutionary War. Choose the war that offends you and destroy the monuments? Why not? Once the precedent is set, one can foresee the very sorry outcome.

Perhaps this conjecture is far-fetched but whoever dreamed we would ever see mobs attacking such historical structures as Christopher Columbus, Spanish Conquistadors, Spanish priests, General Robert E. Lee, Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson — who wrote our Declaration of Independence? Some have even scribbled graffiti on Abraham Lincoln’s monument in Washington, D.C.

Past behavior predicts future behavior. Unless Americans declare that historical monuments are off limits to destruction or removal, the continued eradication of American history could continue.

Free people don’t destroy their history. Even if they don’t approve or “like” history. The way to handle history is to teach it and erect new monuments displaying today’s heroes and values. The land of the free must always tell the story of the universal struggle for individual freedom, (sometimes we forget such struggle has been experienced by literally every ethnic group on earth and, tragically, is still being experienced by millions of people desperately hoping for freedom in many areas in this world.)

Our nation’s history is sacred. Learning our history is our only hope that human behavior will improve. We learn from the past. It provides opportunity to compare and contrast human behavior over the centuries. Without history we don’t know where we came from or where we are going tomorrow.

One lesson learned from the ravaging of Monument Avenue in Richmond that left the city stripped of her history as the capital of the Confederacy and looking like a war zone is what might have been done if more visionary leaders had been in charge. City leaders missed the golden opportunity to educate. They could have erected plaques along Monument Avenue explaining the Civil War and Richmond’s past role in the Confederacy. They could have erected monuments to leaders today that specifically spoke of the values we hold dear today.

Unless we change gears what future mobs will tear down the monuments that we erect today? General Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, or even monuments to our war dead in Iran and Afghanistan?

Who, years from now, will try to destroy our history? Or, as the poet William Butler Yeats asked, “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

© 2021.

(Note: Mary Wakefield Buxton’s new book, a comedy, “On the Toad Again,” is now available for sale at the Southside Sentinel office.)