Town and Country Newspaper

News Article

Memorials – Remember and Teach

Written by Larry Roeder, Editor
2012-07-05

It was just a week ago when some daily newspapers carried the story of some junior high school students, on a class trip, being tossed out of the 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan, New York. They were thrown out for tossing garbage and other items such as baseballs into the reflecting pools. Anyone who has visited the memorial knows that it is a place to reflect on the deaths of thousands of innocents and to honor those who gave their lives to save thousands more.

One of the students was also caught trying to bring live ammunition through a metal detector at the entrance to the site. Nobody knows why.

The memorial opened last year on the 10^th anniversary of the attacks on the United States that took the lives of nearly 3,000 people. The students were probably less than five years old when those attacks occurred. Either the students have a total disregard for what happened on that site or they need to be educated about it – something we hope the school addressed before scheduling a trip there.

Now we’ve received word that one of our own 9/11 memorials was the recipient of a visit from vandals. Last Tuesday, vandals cut a decorative white chain that was strung around the memorial. The memorial is located at the American Legion Post #184 in Palm. It consists of a giant 13-ton steel beam that once supported the World Trade Center and replicas of the Twin Towers set atop a pentagon-shaped base. The aforementioned sets atop a large map of Pennsylvania with a red star denoting the location of Shanksville. It is a truly beautiful and creative piece of work.

A motorcade of more than 2,000 motorcycles and other vehicles transported the 6,400-pound piece of steel in October of 2010. The parade drew applause from large crowds along the route from Newark, NJ to Palm. A few viewers chose to sit in silence with crossed hands and bowed heads to reflect on the enormity of the horror that happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

Like the students in New York, perhaps the act of vandalism at the American Legion Post was perpetrated by actors who never knew, learned or understood the unspeakable horror of the attacks on America and what the memorial means to many people.

As the years go by, we owe it to all of the innocent people who lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2001 to teach or remind everyone about it.

It will be decades before scholars and other professionals will be able to collect all of the data about the near and long-term affects of those attacks.

Memorials and symbols of our nation’s good times and bad give us a reason to remember and an opportunity to teach. When we go out of our way to share their history, we accept the responsibility of sharing the information with the young or uninformed.

When these same tributes are tarnished by intentional acts of vandalism, you can almost hear the memorial cry for the place or people they honor.

Damaging the property of others is not an act of freedom of speech or expression; it is an act of criminal mischief.

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