A few days before the election, I was walking around Santa Monica with some friends. We were going to go for a stroll on the boardwalk, and we found the
Arlington West memorial.
It was a profoundly solemn experience. In the time of a few footfalls, hundreds people went from laughing shouting and talking to one another, to dead silence. There was no border or demarcation to suggest where the "inside" of the memorial was, but there was a very strong sense of having walked into a tomb. People just stopped and stared. I saw people sit down on the boardwalk and cry.
Then, there were just over a thousand crosses. I remember being dizzy and nauseated by the way they seemed to stretch off to the horizon, into the ocean. A 1121 dead. Someone had posted a sign that read, "If we were to acknowledge the number of Iraqi deaths, the crosses would fill this entire beach." Today, there are nearly two thousand dead.
How could anyone drive a truck over that? I can understand ignorance. I can understand foolishness. But the sight of this memorial was like getting pounded in the gut with a telephone pole. What kind of