On Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:19:37 +0000, Chris Tolley
(ukonline really) wrote:
: Robert Coe wrote:
:
: that inscription has also been allowed to deteriorate. It's inlaid (in
: a contrasting color) in a marble floor with high pedestrian traffic
: and has become quite worn. When I was there fifty years ago, it was
: prominent; now some of it is hard to read. It was followed by a verse
: from a poem lamenting the Civil War, and that has been all but
: obliterated.
:
: Some folk might view that as a healthy way to install a memorial of that
: nature. It is after all, only truly a \memorial\ only for as long as
: there are still people around who can put faces to the names, and that
: is becoming a dwindlingly small number in the case of WW2, is more or
: less zero for WW1, and has been zero for the US Civil War for pretty
: well a century. Once everyone with the memory stirred by the memorial
: has gone, it is just a list of names.

Maybe, but virtually every American but the most recent immigrzants had at
least one ancestor killed in the Civil War. (The grandchildren of those
immigrants probably will too; the "melting pot" is still very much in
operation.) And interest in Civil War history hasn't waned much over the
years.

: The problem with attempting to keep alive the memories of conflicts for
: much longer than the lifetimes of those who actually endured them is
: that after a while the wrong messages can be sent, and names such as
: Bannockburn, the Boyne and so on end up as rallying calls for a whole
: new generation of people with too little perspective and too much hot
: blood.

Yes, as has been repeatedly pointed out, those who refuse to learn from
history are doomed to repeat it. And alas, you don't even have to wait for the
participants to die off. How, for example, is it possible that we Americans
forgot the lessons of Vietnam so quickly?

Bob