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| June 2, 2002 To the Editor of the Washington Times: Once again Congress finds a special, worthy cause - an underground Vietnam Veterans Memorial education center - to exempt from laws and in doing so will chip away another piece of the National Mall. It will not end with the Vietnam center. This is only the latest exception to the Commemorative Works Act, which Congress passed and President Reagan signed in 1986, acknowledging even back then the alarming overbuilding on the Mall. First the WWII Memorial was exempted, then the Martin Luther King Memorial. Now Congress -- and the Times - are promoting an education center next to the Vietnam Memorial and at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial. Where will it end? It won't, if every cause is worthy, and what cause isn't? Once there's a Vietnam center, there will have to be a Korean and WWII Memorial center underground as well. Who could argue that those conflicts don't deserve the same respect? The power of the Vietnam Memorial is in its simplicity, its black, shiny walls inscribed with the names of the fallen. Descending and then ascending past those names, we feel and experience directly and personally the sacrifice of war. The Memorial is about the Vietnam conflict. But it is also about war and sacrifice and loss. It is a sober reminder amidst our other memorials on the Mall of the price of freedom. So why do we need to "explain" it with a museum? To try to make the Memorial specifically and exclusively about Vietnam will diminish its universal power. It will dilute the message in the larger context of our Memorials to the democratic ideal enshrined on the Mall. Congress's education goals are certainly to be commended, but this solution is the wrong one. A museum, yes. On the Mall and in competition with the Vietnam Memorial, no. By adding onto the Mall and the Vietnam Wall, Congress is also diminishing the power of those monuments so dear to the Nation. |
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