Spending three mere days attempting to significantly experience the nation’s capital is a nearly impossible task. Yet I feel that our three days in Washington D.C. allowed for a number of encounters, each laden with its own importance.
One of the most infuriating and enlightening moments took place on the last night we were in the capital, when two other students and myself went to the Washington Monument, WWII Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, and Vietnam War Memorial. To preface this experience however, let me begin with some thoughts I had previously in the day…
We took public transportation in Washington D.C., as we have in most major cities where a 15-passenger van isn’t the most efficient way to travel. As we stepped in and out of subway cars for the first two days, I kept seeing these ads for the Busch Gardens water park, where our famed forefathers were displayed in inner tubes and on slides, sporting goggles, leis, sunscreen and other beach garb. I was somewhat astonished by these ads, as I began to reflect on how presidents like Lincoln and Jefferson are presented in our history education throughout childhood and what they represent to the successes of our nation as a whole. The negative repercussions of this bastardized embodiment truly came to light when we visited the Lincoln Memorial…
As we walked up the steps to the memorial, around midnight, we hardly expected to see numerous tourists that were still “taking in the sights” of D.C. Atop the stairs stood a sign that read, “Please be quiet and respectful” and yet it seemed as though not a single person had seen it standing there as the walls of the memorial echoed with chatter and laughter. We started on the right, reading Lincoln’s inaugural address, which was perfectly mirrored by the just-as-eloquent Gettysburg Address on the opposite wall. The two engravings of Lincoln’s most famous and most moving words surrounded his seated statue. Unlike Mt. Rushmore, the memorial actually appeared much larger than I was expecting it to, and it truly spoke to the importance of this historical figure. We tried with all of our might to focus on the beauty and emotion within the memorial but with no success due to the endless noise and substance-less conversation that was occurring all around us. Just from walking from one wall to another I heard conversations about “what this season’s best fashion trend is” “why girls like that will never have boyfriends in high school” and “why that album is better than this one”… I was amazed. The majority of these lemmings stood there, posing in humorous positions in front of this archetypal hero as if the impact made by Lincoln in the past did not directly influence the present they were currently enjoying. We were so overwhelmed with anger and disappointment that we actually had to remove ourselves from the situation and leave the memorial. However, the emotion was only perpetuated by our next experience at the Vietnam War Memorial. As the girls behind us stood, pointing out ‘funny names’ that they found engraved on the massive black walls, I found my fists clenched and my teeth gritted. The Oxford American Dictionary defines a ‘memorial’ as “a structure, established to remind people of a person or event.” And yet, as we walked through these memorials of famed figures who shaped our nation and countless individuals who died for its security, there were few who truly treated them as such. Instead these monuments had turned into Disneyland and Graceland – a place for tourists to go because it was on the map and so that they could say they’d simply been there and done that…
