This is a joint diary by two Kossacks:
all about meme and
mxwing. We're sisters.
First, for the record:
We support our troops. We honor their courage and their devotion to duty. We know they believe in their hearts that they are fighting for us, and for that we are truly, deeply grateful.
We want them to come home safely to their moms and their dads, their husbands and wives, their children, their grandparents.
Today, we happened to be in Washington, D.C., and we thought we'd head over to the Propagandapalooza "Freedom Walk."
We registered online for the walk, and yesterday afternoon headed to the
Commerce Department check-in site, where we were issued our
plastic dog tags and our
t-shirts. Our super-secure exclusive registration number was recorded on a ratty piece of paper, apparently torn from someone's spiral notebook.
We missed the start of the walk but we made it down to the national mall about 10:30 just as the concert was revving up. We started seeing small groups of freedom walkers in standard issue shirts. We tried to get into the concert area, but ran into this barricade, which was exit only. So we walked down near the Lincoln Memorial where there was a public entrance, had our bags searched, and starting walking up the other side of the mall toward the concert. Apparently, there were two separate areas for viewing the concert. The closest section was for registered walkers only, which included us, but could only be accessed through the route the walkers took. We missed the start of the walk, so we couldn't get into the closer area.
The non-registered, non-walking public area was behind the fenced area, and it was completely empty, except for an unused first aid tent, and a security officer on a motorcycle. The area reserved for walkers had a fair number of people in it, but still a lot of space available. Big screens were set up near the stage and at the front of the empty public viewing area.
It was really jarring to hear country music blasting through the mall.
We were here last year on September 11th, and there was a very solemn ceremony commemorating the attacks. We saw servicemen and servicewomen in dress uniform near the Whitehouse. The nearby buildings were draped with flags. There was very little line-dancing or two-steppin', from what we observed.
This year, any sort of quiet remembrance seems to have been replaced by this almost wholesale conflation of September 11th with the war in Iraq.
It was loud, hot, and no one looked very comfortable, as if having fun felt inappropriate, but attending an outdoor concert requires some merriment -- the awkwardness was almost palpable.
And the music blared on, and the sun beat down on a few thousand people who weren't quite sure what they were doing, but whatever it was, they were doing it in matching uniforms.
We've made these trips to Washington and its surrounds motivated by a love of history and a desire to better understand the lives of our ancestors who lived through the early years of our country's existence. For our trip this year, we're concentrating on one ancestor in particular: a member of the 1st Federal Maryland Cavalry who survived the Civil War but died of tuberculosis five years after Appomattox.
Being in DC right now, it's impossible not to think about what the heroes of the Civil War might think about what's become of this country they fought so hard to restore and preserve.
If our civil war was a conflict that marked the end of our country's childhood and the beginning of its rocky adolescence, it appears that we're now at the point of being so hormone-fueled that we can't think straight. The "Patriot Day" Propagandapalooza shows very poor taste and abominable judgement -- something you'd expect of a highschool kid, and which you might possibly, eventually, forgive. For anyone else, it seems wildly inappropriate.
We sought sanctuary from the t-shirt and dogtag brigade inside the Lincoln Memorial. The relative peace was such a relief. It is always an emotional experience reading Lincoln's second inaugural speech, marveling at its eloquence, fighting back tears, and aching for a leader to guide this nation back to itself.
Maybe someday soon.