I had lived in the Washington DC metro area from 1976 thru 1978, but I left to come back to New Jersey as to go to law school (and wound up staying). One of the last things that I did before leaving in late 1978 was to visit the Lincoln Memorial. When you actually live in or around Washington, you don’t make a big effort to visit all the usual tourist attractions; you figure there is plenty of time to get to them. I would drop in on one of the Smithsonians now and then, and I recall having a nice afternoon at the National Archives. But I hardly went out of my way to see the great monuments up close. They’d be there anytime, right?<\/p>\n
As I was getting ready to leave, I decided that I should pay a visit to Honest Abe. I picked a late-morning weekday in the fall, when there would hardly be any tourists around. I wanted to have my \u201cmoment\u201d with Mr. Lincoln. I wanted to feel the power of his presence, to stand in awe of his great achievement in saving the nation and setting African Americans on the path to freedom, and then losing his own life to a fanatic. I figured that would take at least 20 minutes if not the better part of an hour at his Memorial down at the far end of the reflecting pool on the Mall. So I climbed the steps that day and walked past the columns, stepping into the temple chamber. I approached the super-sized “portrait in stone” of the 16th President of the United States, the awe circuits in my brain tingling and ready to go. It was about to be me and Old Abe, contemplating the ages together.<\/p>\n
Well, not quite. Turns out that I wasn’t alone, and that my companion at the site wasn’t there for awe-struck contemplation. An elderly African-American fellow who probably worked for the Park Service was busy with a mop and some other cleaning instruments, keeping Abe’s temple tidy. It didn’t look as though he’d be finished any time soon. He gave me a quick, almost dismissive glance — as if to say \u201cthis is what it looks like, so let me get on with my job here\u201d. I decided to leave.<\/p>\n
Ah yes, Abraham Lincoln and the black man. It was a complex relationship back then, and it remains complicated today. I wanted to bask in the Lincolnian myth and legend, but I got a dose of daily-life reality instead. The road to wisdom takes many unanticipated twists and turns along the way, don’t it. <\/p>\n
Perhaps that was the better experience for me as a young man. It’s not always easy to know if we are getting closer or further from wisdom. Many of us think that Old Abe as President was homing in on a great wisdom. Others, including those whom Lincoln had purportedly \u201cfreed\u201d and their children, weren’t and still aren’t always so sure.<\/p>\n
Lincoln certain deserves his temple; but mostly because he personifies an historical sweep, a grand phenomenon of events that involved millions of men and women. That old black guy moping the Lincoln Memorial that morning, whose great-great grandparents were no doubt a part of the momentous events of Lincoln’s time, was just as much ‘about’ that Memorial as was Abraham Lincoln.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had lived in the Washington DC metro area from 1976 thru 1978, but I left to come back to New Jersey as to go to law school (and wound up staying). One of the last things that I did before leaving in late 1978 was to visit the Lincoln Memorial. When you actually live […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1891"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1891"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1893,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1891\/revisions\/1893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}