Thursday, December 13, 2007
This is beautiful--an attempt to attach names to people who had, in the first half of the 20th century, been institutionalized and buried with only numbers marking their gravesites. This emphasizes the importance of both how we treat our dead (which seems, in this case, to be consistent with how they were treated in life) and the importance of naming, of acknowledging that speech and names are what makes humans different from animals. It is also a recognition of the continuity of community--that we are connected to the ones who institutionalized our own family members (I know that this happened in my own family two generations ago)--and that it is our responsibility to make reparations as far as we can and simply to remember, so that we don't repeat our errors.
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