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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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Last updated:
5/2/2007; 9:47:35 PM
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