IT IS DISCOURAGING HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE SHOCKED BY HONESTY AND HOW FEW BY DECEIT.”
Noel Coward
Coming through the Memorial Day Weekend it might be that since we were busy here on the hill with visitors that I am a bit tired. It does not take much to wear me out anymore. What I would give for a little bit of that 20’s vim an vigor, (not what I would have called it then). It seems that popular culture is very draining on the spirit of those who still believe in the greatness of our country and the goodness of our people. We have so many visitors who tell us how friendly the Kansas people are and it makes me wonder, are other places just not that way anymore?
Of course the television would drag anyone’s spirit down if the programming is really taken seriously. Just when you think the vast wasteland cannot get worse then it does. At least this time of year when executives thinks everyone is waiting in lines at airports that programming can be thrown on the garbage heap, that they would run the old movies that celebrate the people that we are supposed to be memorializing on Memorial Weekend.
Then the news of so many who have lost their lives by drowning and accidents on a weekend that is supposed to be reflective and enjoyable can bring down the spirit. And of course there are still those who just have to commit crimes as though there is nothing that is worth honoring anymore such as their own lives and others.
On many levels the news of a historic cemetery near Cheney Lake is just the nail in the coffin as to the values that have been spread to today’s generations. For anything that is fun I just never have been able to see, even when I was sowing wild oats, how it is fun to destroy tombstones. And as a historian it offends me at a deep level.
I have tried several times to try and get legislation to look at some legal protections for burial sites and abandoned cemeteries. It would not have stopped the vandalism of this weekend but it would put more legal bite into the penalties when the delinquents are ever found.
There are too many abandoned cemeteries and small burial sites that are unattended that have no protection by law. If there is no entity or group or even individuals to take care of burial places a land owner can pull up the stones and farm right over the spot if no one has been buried there in fifteen years.
Maybe I am just tired or the fact that from the very top of our government throughout the culture there seems to be no honor or sense of what others have provided for us. And by forgetting such our children and theirs are in danger of losing what we have had and what so many gave their lives for. Much lip service is given when the camera is rolling, but the reality is that to point out that what we as a society have stood for is soon to be given away by the wholesale telling of lies and by deceit.
Any institution or any undertaking that has the hand of man in it will never be perfect. Yet that perfection is something to be worked for and aspired to. As bright and cheerful as I would like to be after such an important holiday I am hoping that a little rest and the effort by others will return us down the path that was chosen for us in 1776.
