I saw this news item about the scuttling of plans to replace the Tomb of the Unknowns monument at Arlington Cemetery. The marble slab has some cracks in it, and is showing its age and the effects of exposure. Cemetery officials think additional repairs (it’s been patched up twice) will look bad and not last long; they want to replace the monument with a shiny new one. To the rescue ride Senators Daniel Akaka and Jim Webb, who attached a rider to a defense bill that would prevent replacement of the Tomb monument. They prefer another repair job.
I’m not convinced about this. Do Webb and Akaka expect the perpetually-repaired monument to last forever? Maybe they envision it looking like the Parthenon in a few thousand years? Marble crumbles. Won’t all those headstones in the rest of Arlington Cemetery chip away to dust in time, too? Would Akaka and Webb be against replacing those, too?
Why is only the original marble a worthy monument? I doubt the builders of that stone thought it would last for all time. One day, hundreds of years from now, we’ll have to decide what to do when larger marble monuments start to crumble, we (that is, the nation) will have to decide what to do about it. Future Akakas and Webbs, I presume, will want to eternally grout these edifices until they consist of more spackle than spectacle.
I hope our nation lasts long enough that we can allow future generations to decide what to do with the monuments we’ve built. Future Americans will get to decide how to memorialize the figures we venerate. Who are we to dictate how Abraham Lincoln will be remembered in the year 2525?