Petula Dvorzak of the Washington Post called me recently and asked me what I thought of a memorial to the victims of school shootings. I’m not keen on the current fashion for memorializing victims, which has became an almost knee-jerk response to any calamity. In my own city, Philadelphia, only a few blocks from where I live, a memorial is under construction. The 125-foot by 25-foot memorial park will commemorate the six people who were killed on June 5, 2013, when a slipshod demolition resulted in a building collapsing on top of a Salvation Army thrift store. A tragedy for those concerned, no doubt, but does it really warrant a memorial? I am sympathetic to the temporary memorials that relatives and friends of victims place after shootings and traffic accidents. These fulfill an important immediate function, especially for those mourning, and their temporariness is part of their character. But formal memorials are forever. We remember soldiers’ sacrifice in war memorials, or those who gave their lives in the line of duty. I’m not sure that the innocent victims of muggings—or school shootings—are in the same category. Surely a simple plaque would be more appropriate?
June 5 memorial, Philadelphia
Memorials are for the contemporaries of the recently departed. They are a futile attempt to give meaning to meaningless events. It’s apparently a natural human urge to want to do this, as we see it all the time. Just down the hill from where I live there’s a sharp turn in the road lined by a few trees. One tree sported for a couple years a cross and some plastic flowers memorializing the spot where a driver took the turn too quickly and slammed into the tree, killing his passenger. Family and friends wanted to place a marker, a remembrance, and that’s perfectly understandable. But the cross and flowers are now gone. People forget and move on. And that’s not a bad thing. Who wants to be forever tormented by the aftermath of a moment’s inattention, or a natural disaster, or a political nightmare? Thank evolution for making the gift of human forgetfulness possible.
The urge to memorialize society’s important or traumatic events gets its powerful momentum from the fact that there’s so many of us riding along in the car when it hits that curve. We were all there for 9/11, Vietnam, Korea, WWII and on back. But, especially in modern times, there are abundant alternative ways to remember these events through music, poetry, movies and photos, not to mention political activity as we now see with the teenage survivors of the recent shooting. Why build a monument? Far better just make sure it doesn’t happen again.
When I was a kid in the fifties I remember endless TV shows, seemingly all narrated by Walter Cronkite, rerunning every aspect of WWII. Well, they had the footage after all, and I’m sure it was a cheap way to fill airtime. Plus epic WWII war movies have been on the big screen right up to the present day. I wonder if this is why it took so long for the Greatest Generation to finally feel the need for that ghastly monument in DC. That trauma of that war has been gnawed over continuously since the war ended. Nobody could forget it, and the spectacle of wreaths and fountains adds precisely nothing to our memories. Ken Burns does it so much better.
The only war memorial I’ve ever seen that really works and seems worth the stone put into it is, obviously, the Vietnam Memorial. For someone of my generation it carries a lot of baggage, and what I mostly see is the bureaucratic bungling and lies that killed all those soldiers, and I like to think that that aspect of the memorial will endure long after this generation is gone. A true anomaly, a great piece of art built on the government tab.