People ask me why the screensaver on my phone is a picture of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC.
I traveled there over a decade ago with my daughter when she competed in a final mock trial competition. This is where college students compete as “attorneys” in pretend trial settings. It’s a fun and interactive way to learn about the legal system.
While there, we had the opportunity to visit the incredible museums and special sites of the DC area.
The Smithsonian is the world’s largest museum and research complex, housing 21 museums and a national zoo. It safeguards our most precious documents and is free to the public. This institution works to preserve our heritage and disseminate knowledge of our history to all generations. Some standouts include the Magna Carta, and the Declaration of Independence, the original star-spangled banner that inspired our national anthem. as well as those items that represent our biggest icons – from the ruby slippers in the Wizard of Oz, to, Archie Bunker’s famous chair in All in the Family, where racial issues were publicly discussed on the air in the seventies, and a full-sized replica of the operating room in M*A*S*H, and Mohammed Ali’s boxing gloves.
In the Air and Space Museum, we saw the Wright brothers’ original flying machines and the actual Apollo 11 command module. It looked like a tin can. Yet three men believed in its ability to shoot them to the moon and still get them home again in July 1969. I was a little girl when I sat by the TV, waiting anxiously to see the first human being walk on the moon. Even at that young age, I understood the incredible history being made. Seeing it in person gave me goose bumps. This is what mankind can achieve when we pull together.
The Korean War memorial haunts me to this day. The 19 sculptures of men appearing to trudge through the rice paddies with their ponchos fluttering over their backpacks and guns was unforgettable. Their poignant faces filled with exhaustion, courage and purpose.
The Vietnam War Memorial was the design of an architect student who won a competition in 1981. Two black walls, each spanning 246 feet and 9 inches, filled with over 58,000 names of those killed or missing in action, come together. It also has a bronze sculpture of three soldiers and a women’s memorial statue depicting three nurses attending to a hurt soldier. As you travel its stark, long, black length you go down at its center, as though joining those buried below, before rising at one side to give a clear view of the Washington monument and the Lincoln Memorial on the other.
The Lincoln Memorial is one of many erected to those individuals who guided this country through its toughest moments. They all made it clear- no matter how much we struggle, no matter how much we disagree, we will always endure. Sitting in a chair, you can imagine Lincoln looking out at his beloved country filled with turmoil and dread that it might implode from inner demons. His left hand clenched to show determination to end the Civil War and the right hand open, welcoming his brothers back to the union.
Looking into the abyss of warring families and utter destruction he famously said,
“America will never be
destroyed from the outside.
If we falter and lose our freedoms,
It will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
On the steps is a plaque where Martin Luther King Jr. stood and gave his famous “I have a dream” speech at the end of a march on Washington in 1963 to over 250,000 followers. Standing in that space, looking out over the mall you could sense his presence and the people huddled together on that hot and humid August day, knowing history was being made, and change was coming.
Almost sixty years ago those words still resonate and send a chill through my spine,
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed:
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
I chose not to visit the Holocaust Museum. I truly appreciate its existence. Reaffirming the truth and horrors of what evil incarnate means. But I’d paid my respects to the original in Israel and couldn’t bear another trip.
I knew what it meant to travel to Eastern Europe clutching my passport, knowing at any moment someone could decide my fate, as they did decades ago with my ancestors, and no one would stop them. I walked across the Berlin Wall into a land where color and freedoms disappeared.
But not here, not in this country. My country. We have laws. And here I was, with my own child, seeing her act out the very legal system that keeps us free. We toured the Supreme Court, where 9 men and women decide our fate and the fate of our democracy.
It was a profound and emotional trip I will cherish forever.
That’s why my screensaver is a picture that I took of Abraham Lincoln, sitting in front of his Memorial. A snapshot of one of the most painful, traumatic moments in our history, symbolizing our survival as a nation. That trip, shared with my eighteen-year-old daughter on the precipice of adulthood, was not just a trip down memory lane for us as a nation, but rather a shining beacon to the testament of our resilience, strength and undaunting willingness to fight for what is right and just.
So that someday, my grandchild and I can share the same monuments and feel the same pride in knowing, no matter how many times we may fall or face hurdles, this amazing nation, dedicated to democracy and its people, will always survive.
-https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/smithsonian-entertainment-exhibition-showcase-pop-culture
-https://airandspace.si.edu/
-https://www.nps.gov/vive/index.htm
-https://www.nps.gov/linc/index.htm
-https://www.history.com/news/lincoln-memorial-facts