Potent quotables
Almost 4 million gallons of embalming fluid are placed underground with the dead each year, and these chemicals eventually seep into the groundwater.
They toppled forty-foot-tall saguaro cacti older than the Declaration of Independence and drained an ancient and rare desert aquifer in order to mix cement.
More than 6 million people died while enslaved on American soil between the early 1600s and the Civil War. Yet the whereabouts of a vast majority of their remains are unknown. This is partly the result of conscious acts by Southern plantation owners to hide the evidence of their misdeeds. Although the institution of human bondage was legal, the people involved in perpetuating it, including Jefferson, reveal through their concealment of enslaved people’s graves that they understood its hideous immorality.
Think of the mental gymnastics needed by the people writing, approving, printing, and finally displaying the words humane treatment of slaves on an educational board that 500,000 people pass each year.
Jefferson, who possessed enough moral clarity to write about the evils of slavery throughout his life. Jefferson, who gave the world the phrase All men are created equal. Jefferson, who yet somehow didn’t manage to keep a single record on where enslaved people were buried on his property.
American city developers intentionally used highway construction to place asphalt moats around urban communities of color.
By starving these cemeteries of funding, maintenance, and attention, we obscure the important and ugly chapters from our past that they reveal and that should not be forgotten. Or maybe that’s partly why we neglect them.
Our cemeteries reveal where our values lie and how we lie about our values.
It’s often said that honest war literature is, by its nature, anti-war literature.
Aiming mindless rage at so-called outsiders is much easier than looking inward for answers to problems, as we know.
This template for corporate efficiency and a revenue-driven approach to mourning in America came when people sought to separate themselves from reminders of death and their own inevitable expiration dates.
My own life’s actions have been driven, consciously or not, by some vain attempt at leaving a mark, through my role as a parent passing lessons and bad dad jokes on to my kids, as a teacher for much the same reason, as a military officer serving my country and participating in history, and as a writer hoping my words endure.