 brightlight4 says: Left out in the rain to rot were crayon drawings by children who had lost a parent, photographs of soldiers with their babies, painted portraits and thank-you notes from grade-school kids to fallen soldiers they had never known. Colors of artworks ran together. Photos were blurred and wilted. Poems and letters were illegible wads of wet paper. A worker in a brown uniform wandered among the graves, blasting the headstones with a power washer without regard to what was left of the mementos -- or the obviously uncomfortable mourners looking on. Some items got further soaked. The worker blasted others across the grass. Many of them would end up in a black trash bin in the cemetery's service area. Arlington's poor treatment of the mementos and gifts -- testaments to the personal cost of the post-9/11 wars in the Middle East -- appeared to stand in contrast to practices at other cemeteries. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which runs 130 cemeteries across the country, asks people It's a tough position. Arlington's mandate is to maintain the grounds of the cemetery, and visitors are specifically asked not to leave exactly these sorts of items. But it's a very human gesture.I live in Oakland. I see this sort of memorials all the time, on the streets where people get killed, sometimes outside their homes. Candles, photos, notes, it' all accumulates. Left a candle myself. In a real sense it's about competing visions of how the cemetery should be, the ones who envision dignified, well manicured rows of gravesites, and the very personalized offerings to the dead on the other side. For me, the geometric rows of military cemeteries are disquieting. But I understand that ... I was surprised by what people leave at graves as little of what is left will resist the weather for long. We in the UK only leave flowers and stuff like that, but having said that, if Arlington has a reputation for respecting these memorials, why this sudden lack of respect? That is what I don't understand. As I understand it, the respect is towards the gravesite. The idea is to keep them uncluttered and well manicured. The personal memorials are technically (if insensitively) considered clutter. I'm not surprised that The Wall maintains a strict policy of collecting all the stuff left behind. That memorial is part of the national exorcism, and the gestures of grief are part of that psyche-cleansing that still goes on. It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out. I personally don't come from a "military" family, although Grandpa taking the family up into the hills and fighting the Japs may count as us being a "guerrilla family". |
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