Dr. Omed's Tent Show Revival

WHITE CROSSES, BLACK RIBBONS, AND CHALK
I was driving my daughter to school one morning, and I saw one of those roadside memorials to accident victims at a streetcorner, a cross made of two-by-fours painted white, with name and date in black, with a few faded artificial flowers. Nobody ever takes these things down. These roadside memorials have manna, messing with them would be like desecrating a grave; very bad medicine. Then I thought, "What if white crosses with the names of the soldiers killed in Iraq appeared along the roadsides all over America...? Then I started to think about what I would need to do it. Then I started to think about other things I could do, on a thin dime. Black Ribbons with the motto: WE MOURN THE DEAD/WE HONOR THEIR SERVICE/WE DO NOT SUPPORT THIS WAR/YELLOW IS NOT OUR COLOR;printed on leaflets that can slipped under the windshield wiper of an SUV; and chalk, sidewalk chalk, 2.99 a bucket. Walking with chalk in my pocket, writing the number of the dead in Iraq on walls, sidewalks, the middle of streets...stayed tuned for further developments, and keep those emails, comments, and .jpgs coming. By this time I had dropped my daughter off, and was on my way to work, tooling along the expressway brainstorming to myself. In Tulsa, the verge and medians of the highways are landscaped, often wide lawns of grass planted with trees. Last July I visited Arlington National Cemetery, and in my mind's eye I saw those lawns with the endless ranks of tombstones. I thought, "What if, on a morning of a chosen day, commuters were confronted by a row of white crosses, each with the name of a dead soldier on it?"

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5/2/2007; 9:47:16 PM

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Tuesday, May 31, 2005

ACCORDING TO CNN:

There have been 1,836 coalition troop deaths, 1,656 Americans, 89 Britons, 10 Bulgarians, one Dane, two Dutch, two Estonians, one Hungarian, 21 Italians, one Kazakh, one Latvian, 17 Poles, one Salvadoran, three Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and 18 Ukrainians in the war in Iraq as of May 30, 2005.

There have been nine names added to the CNN casualty list for May 2005 since we planted crosses on Sunday morning:

Sgt. David N. Wimberg May 25, age 24 ; Sgt. Alfred B. Siler, May 25, age 33; Maj. Ricardo A. Crocker, May 26, age 39; Sgt. Mark A. Maida, May 26, age 22; Chief Warrant Officer Joshua Michael Scott, May 27, age 28 ; Chief Warrant Officer Matthew Scott Lourey, May 27, age 40; Lt. Col. Albert E. Smart, May 28, age 41; Spc. Phillip N. Sayles, May 28, age 26; Lance Cpl. Alan Brackenbury, May 29, age 21.

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