Finding My Place

We are just back from an East Coast swing with our daughter and three of the grandkids. On Monday, Lisa was tied up with school system interviews, so we took the kids for some drives down memory lane in Washington, DC, plus memorials. We had promised their father that we would see the Vietnam Memorial and ourselves that we would visit the Martin Luther King Memorial, so after driving past the World War II, we parked near the Lincoln, took in the Korean War, and topped it off with Arlington Cemetery.

First stop was Sidwell Friends, where Juan worked and Lisa went to school. We could not get onto the campus at all because it was completely fenced off, and even the security people who remembered Juan, sitting in their office by the gate, could not let us in. It used to be open, even when the Secret Service was there with Chelsea Clinton, one of Lisa’s classmates. How did militarization creep into even a Quaker school in such a visible way?

Then all those wars. The Gettysburg address: “… that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Walking past the long sweep of names of the Americans who died in Vietnam, while trying to explain to an eight-year-old why Americans got involved at all. The rows on rows of graves in Arlington, leading me to look up “In Flanders Fields.” I had forgotten that it ends: “Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.”

Each war seems to lead to the next, after attempting to be the last. Because one set of people died, another needs to as well. Where are the memorials to peace, to the wars prevented through diplomacy, agreement, and cooperation?

Well, King was there. In front of Lincoln, we stood where he spoke. At his memorial, the stone representation of him has a beautiful spot, overlooking the Tidal Basin. The quotations in marble around him show that he turned against the war; he saw its connection to violence at home, reminding us that peace is not the absence of war, it is the presence of justice.

Where are the memorials to peace? My grandchildren deserve to be inspired to work for it.