Monument touring (MD)

Kate Drabinski

... We gathered at the Soldiers and Sailors memorial in Wyman Park. I've ridden my bike past this thing countless times on my way here and there, but this was actually my first time getting a close look at the thing — and learning that it's a Union monument. We're mostly talking about Confederate monuments these days, but that doesn't mean there aren't monuments to the other side, or to a whole bunch of other wars. There are memorials to the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812—heck, that one has a shrine—the Spanish American War, the Korean War, World Wars I and II. We sure love our wars around here, don't we? ...

Our next stop was the Confederate Women of Maryland Monument amid the trees on the square of grass where Charles and University Parkway meet. It's another one you can miss if you aren't paying attention. Eli pointed out that as car travel came to dominate the landscape, these memorials and monuments that are just back from the roads became more and more invisible. If the goal of these monuments is to keep folks thinking about or revere-ing these events or whatever, car culture's pretty much ruined all that. This generation's public memorials are at roadsides and slung over freeway overpasses, because that's where we see things now.

We spent a good bit of time here, Eli reading to us from letters to the editor sent in support and opposition to this monument at the time it was built. The same arguments we are hearing today were heard back then, a reminder that a little history and maybe we could start different conversations, or maybe we really do need to have these conversations over and over again ...

It got me thinking: I wonder if we could use this time of talking about Confederate monuments and what, if anything, to do with them to also talk about how we remember and what we remember about war in general. What if we remembered Lanier without the nostalgia for the Confederacy but with an eye to the lives destroyed by wars and prisons more generally? What if we etched our landscape with memories of the costs rather than the alleged glories of war, whether it's the Confederate or Union side we're talking about? What if our memorials reminded us of the costs of slavery, the reason this war was fought in the first place? We ended our tour at the Lee-Jackson monument with these and other questions, no easy answers. Now that's a good field trip.

http://www.citypaper.com/news/columns/field-tripping/field-tripping-confederate-monument-tour-20151215-story.html