The other item of note was about the city's plans to remove some dying Norwegian maples in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens that were planted there as World War I memorials, and replace them with scarlet oaks, a longer-living species, as memorials for the victims of September 11. The Armistice memorial will be remembered with a plaque. This disturbed me not because I'm related to a WWI veteran, nor 'cause I like maples better than oaks, but because I get kind of itchy whenever I sense history is being rewritten. "But it's not!" you tell me, "There's going to be a plaque! And the Great War is still in history books, remembered by most conventional historians as the real beginning of the 20th century. Where's this rewriting you imagine?" I'll tell you where: It's in the trees.
Trees are about the most impressive memorial structure one could assemble--Not only do they stand up on their own, are tall, and do not require electricity or gas for eternal flames, or even day-to-day maintenance, but by golly, they're ALIVE, they're LIVING reminders of people who were once also LIVING but are now DEAD. And when there's a great mass of them, an arbor or a forest, then the loss of human life being memorialized becomes all the more poignant to the observer. The drawback, as the Brooklyn landscapers are aware, is that memorial trees, unlike granite, are not immortal. They, like the people they represent, eventually die. If you want an eternal tree memorial, you have to keep replacing the trees. Prior to 9/11, the Brooklyn Botanic folks were planning to replace the trees without ceremony, just re-naming the arbor "The Armistice Oaks," acknowledging that the WWI memorial, if not the specific trees, is eternal. But then history rolled along.
I guess what irks me about this whole affair is that the Brooklyn Botanic landscapers, the whole city, and indeed the whole country, is publicly and overtly ranking tragedy. 9/11/01 trumps 11/11/18 because it was sudden, it was not defined within the Western construct of "War," and most significantly I think, it is more recent. It's natural, I'm sure, to consider tragedies in living memory more meaningful than those in less-living or written memory, but to truly "learn from history," that great ideal we've been promised all throughout our educations and admonished to us in the editorial pages of our newspapers, we have to remember history, and not lose our grip on its significances, regardless of whether our grandfathers fought in Flanders or what-have-you in the way of personal connection. If the memory of World War I and America's involvement in it (yes, I know the U.S. was not nearly so involved in the First WW as it was in the Second) can be devalued by so many uprooted maples, then so can the record of 3,000-some killed by terrorists in airliners 70 years from now when some old withered scarlet oaks are pulled from Brooklyn's sand.
We can't keep doing this, people. Either we keep building new memorials in new locations until every acre of land is covered or until world peace reigns and natural disasters cease, or we re-evaluate our conventional methods of memorial. Lost in the rubble at Ground Zero, by the way, is a memorial sculpture remembering the handful of people killed in the 1993 WTC bombing. If memorials of disasters can be obscured by further disasters, then we have a problem.
I say: replace the maples as scheduled and as necessary due to the species' lifespan. But don't rededicate them. The folks who planted those trees in 1918 has all the weight of global tragedy on their minds and hope for a peaceful future in their hearts, and all that went into the saplings. And as for a 9/11 memorial monument of some sort, I'm all for it, but I really don't think it has to be monumental. Maybe a small sculpture, thousands of copies of which would be made, and distributed throughout the nation. Each tiny village will have one in its town hall or fire station. Every military base, every public park, every city hall, every visitor center in every national recreation area, all identical and equally meaningful. (I've no ideas about what this should look like--that's where the pro architects, artists, and visionaries come in.) That way, if one gets buried by human or natural activity, the spirit lives on in another memorial sculpture 5 miles away. Spread it out. Size doesn't matter, but mass certainly does. Remember "Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes"? How big was each crane? Yet how awesome was the idea of 1000 of them, in the mind of each seven-year-old who read that story?
I just don't want people to forget, that's all.
