Monuments

We have known for millennia that there is power even in a mere list of names.  There are, after all, lessons to be learned from the genealogies of the first chapter of the Gospel According to St. Matthew and the third chapter of the Gospel According to St. Luke.  Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon are all prominent for their virtues -- and for their flaws.  Even King Manasseh, who is probably best known as the idolater who (likely) had the Prophet Isaiah sawed in two, converted after he was carried off to Babylon, and a penitential prayer attributed to him is a part of the Church's liturgy to this day.  What is more, even Queen Jezebel, about whom little good can be said, was in the ancestry of Jesus, since her daughter Athaliah married King Jehoram of Judah and was the mother of King Ahaziah.  One moral of all these stories is, perhaps, that there is some good and some bad in each of our histories; this is the condition of the human race that Christ came to save.  This lesson only exists, though, because so many names and stories have been remembered, rather than being conveniently hidden and forgotten.

More recently, lists of names have been used to commemorate the victims of crimes and tragedies.  It is easy to find readings of the names of those killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, in the 9/11 terror attacks, in the Vegas shooting spree, in the Boston Marathon bombing, in the shoot-down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, in the Dayton mass shooting, in the Charleston church shooting, etc.  Perhaps the most famous such list of names is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which, its name not withstanding, primarily honors those who died in that controversial and divisive war, not those who returned to live as veterans.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is not literally a gravestone, but it is something similar to the Cenotaph World War I memorial in London -- something like a tombstone much farther than normal six feet from the actual mortal remains.  And it still seems to be understood -- or at least it was understood not long ago -- that only a real creep desecrates graves; thus when Jewish graves were vandalized in 2017 in Philadelphia and St. Louis, it was rightly expected that everyone would be outraged -- whether or not one agrees with their religion or shares their ethnicity.  If we owe the benefit of the doubt to those who are still alive and able to defend their reputations, we all the more owe it to the dead.

It is within this context that you should be able to understand my reaction to the decision of the current administration of the University of Alabama to remove the monuments shown below.

A university is a kind of family, so this is something like seeing that your first cousin's son, whom you barely know, has kicked over your grandmother's tombstone to win the approval of his bratty friends, that he has posted a video of it online, and that the video shows him doing it in a smug, self-righteous, and self-congratulatory way.  The familial relationship remains, but it makes the offense all the greater.  No matter what happens afterwards, the offense will be remembered, and there will be AT LEAST a scar remaining on the relationship.  At the bare minimum, you would not be cheering the kid on at his upcoming football games.  That grave marker he made such a show of kicking over would mean more to you than all his sports trophies put together.