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Memorials have been much in the news lately. Last week saw the dedication of one in Oklahoma City at the site of the Murrah Federal Building where 169 people died in a bomb blast five years ago. There was continued discussion of what sort of memorial would be appropriate for the 15 deaths at Columbine High School a year ago. Wal-Mart keeps raising money for a memorial to honor America's World War II soldiers, and archeologists from the National Park Service are looking for the site of the Sand Creek Massacre with a national monument to ensue.
All this inspires some contemplation. What purpose is a memorial supposed to serve, and precisely what should we be remembering?
Let's start with Columbine High School. We've got the two perpetrators, whose major desire was apparently to be remembered for their mayhem, giving them posthumous fame to the extent that some famous Hollywood producer would make a movie of their evil exploits.
Constructing a memorial thereby perpetuates their actions, thus giving them a considerable degree of what they wanted: enduring notoriety.
So the best way to thwart their desires might be to pretend it never happened -- repair the school building and get back to normal life as quickly as possible.
Then again, if we take the expressed desires of the villains into account, one way or another, they're gaining some control over the process, and that's the last thing that society wants.
So should a memorial focus on the victims? That seems appropriate at Columbine High School, Oklahoma City and Sand Creek. But in that case, what is the memorial saying about the victims, besides observing that these people had the terrible misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?
We would all like to believe that they didn't die in vain, something we can believe at war memorials where soldiers were fighting for a cause, but that belief is difficult to sustain where those who died were just going about their routine.
That's different from the victims of the Ludlow Massacre, who could have left for safer places than Huerfano County, but stayed to help sustain a strike by coal miners.
They put themselves in harm's way, though they had no way of knowing that the Colorado National Guard, on the payroll of the Rockefeller interests because the state had run out of money to pay the troops, would rake the tent camp with machine-gun fire and force them into cellars before a fire swept across the camp with suffocating smoke.
When the smoke cleared, 40 bodies were on the ground, and in one cellar, two women and 11 children had died of suffocation.
This happened on April 20, 1914 -- 85 years to the day before the Columbine High School murders.
There is a memorial to the Ludlow victims, erected by the United Mine Workers union a mile or two west of Interstate 25 between Walsenburg and Trinidad.
But that's about the size of it -- our state government does not hold a moment of silence, lower its flag, or in any other way remember Ludlow, perhaps because the fingers on the triggers belonged to agents of the state government who were protecting the rights of coal-mine owners to violate state laws about short-weighting, eight-hour days, company stores, honest coroners' inquests and the like.
So it seems that there is something inherently political
about memorials. A memorial is society's way of saying
this event is worth remembering,
with the
implication that events without memorials are not worth
remembering.
Thus the campaign to build a World War II memorial in Washington. That's a worthy cause, but it's also worth noting that in 1996, the sesquicentennial of the Mexican War came and went without any noteworthy official celebrations or memorial dedications, as did the centennial of the Spanish-American War in 1998.
There are events we want people to remember, and events we'd just as soon pretend never happened. Colorado will build a memorial to one April 20 tragedy, but remain officially silent about the other one.
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