For many years, until the internet came along, Oil & Gas Journal's pipeline editor traveled to Washington, DC, annually to gather data for OGJ's Pipeline Economics Report. The research took most of each day for an entire summer week.
The evenings, however, still light and a bit cooler, provided the chance to see some of the city's sights. And I did. And I wrote about them.
A column here in those days, aimed somewhat at readers less familiar with US history and its major figures, focused on the memorials in Washington to two of those figures—Thomas Jefferson and Franklin D. Roosevelt (OGJ, Aug. 23, 1999, p. 23).
The column called attention to their words, on which their memorials are organized and which eloquently express much of what this nation has aspired to. In 1999, I found both the physical sites and the language moving; I still do.
An addition
Last month, the US dedicated a third memorial, this time to someone many Americans remember well: Martin Luther King Jr. The memorial to the civil rights activist, assassinated in 1968, sits adjacent FDR's memorial and directly across the Tidal Basin from Jefferson's.
Like those other two, King's memorial impresses with its simplicity and dignity. Its web site, www.mlkmemorial.org, describes the design and its meaning: Two parted stones form the entry and lead to a larger stone that "appears to have been thrust into the plaza…." Text on its side from King's 1963 speech clarifies the relationship: "Out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope."
From that solitary Stone of Hope emerges a larger-than-life sculpture of a somber King, standing, arms crossed over his chest, staring over the Tidal Basin towards the Jefferson Memorial. Flaring in a crescent from the entry stones to flank the Stone of Hope is a 450-ft granite wall engraved with 14 of King's pronouncements.
Like both nearby older memorials, it is those quotations that convey the overarching principles of the monument's subject and his country. In part:
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." And…
"I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits." And…
"Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies."
The sense and tenor of these and the 11 others echo one of FDR's, which I quoted back in 1999: "We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization."
Global effect
After that column published 12 years ago, a friend wrote to say he liked it but wondered how many of my readers shared my admiration for the ideas etched in those monuments. Perhaps that might be more true today.
Growing up in the US South in the 1950s and '60s, I rarely heard Martin Luther King Jr. praised. (Roosevelt either, for that matter.) Today there remain many who believe King's ideas and words are undercut by his failings as a man. Let's hope few of us have our own beliefs scrutinized in the glare of how we have lived.
But then the recent protests and revolutions across much of the Arab-speaking oil and gas world, what are they about if not dignity, hope, a desire to control one's future? Surely, somewhere on the streets of Homs, or Tripoli, or Manama, or Cairo, or Sanaa someone has heard of Jefferson, Roosevelt, or King, or at least read their words?
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