The Moving Wall

[Andy]

On occasion I?ve read posts that indicate James? area of the country is considered a bit weird. I will not dispute there are some people with odd ideas that live on the left coast. However I?d like to present a little geographical balance to these discussions.
Recently, The Moving Wall came to our little city. It was a memorable site but we didn?t stay long. After about 15 minutes I needed to walk away and sit in the shade. It seemed like a wake for way too many people, way too many friends. But that?s not what I wanted to talk about.
A resident of our town, a college professor of History and Chairman of the town?s school board wrote an article for our local newspaper. Below are excerpts from that article. They are not taken out of context, just a taste of what professor Engle had to say.
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Wall Event Striking and Troubling:
There were lots of good intentions, hard work and community spirit invested in bringing The Moving Wall to Easthampton. But - at least form my perspective - a strangeness, a tension, an edge surrounded that event. I am thinking of the careful and delicate phrasing of the opening speeches; the state trooper in full uniform who brought the spirit of vaudeville to the national anthem; the epic poem filled with elaborate cosmic imagery. Even the military drills seemed oddly muted - one might even say half-hearted.

The unhappy truth is that there is no way to separate the deaths of all these young people from the nature of the war that took their lives, along with those of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. But that is precisely what was being attempted - to honor and memorialize the dead without talking about or dealing with how and why they died. The result is an unsuccessful attempt at historical amnesia. The cold, hard fact is that the Vietnam War was a crime against humanity.
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The good professor goes on and on but you get the idea. He goes on and on about how our leaders and perhaps some of us were never put on trial for ?crimes against humanity?. Reading that article was a lot like being at the wake of a friend and someone saying the dead person deserved what they got.
If the Wall has been in your community or if it will visit in the future, hope you don?t have a professor Engle who has a direct line to your local newspaper. If that SOB dies before me, I plan on going to the funeral. After the eulogy I?m going to demand to do a rebuttal.

Stay healthy,
Andy