This is not my Kansas

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/us/03wichita.html

In Kansas, Proposed Monument to a Wartime Friendship Tests the Bond

" WICHITA, Kan. — This city’s small population of Vietnamese-Americans imagined a new monument in Veterans Memorial Park, a peaceful slope along the Arkansas River blooming with monuments to soldiers gone.

They pictured an American service member, in bronze, his arm resting protectively around the shoulder of a South Vietnamese comrade — an appreciation, they said, of the Americans’ alliance in a war that shaped their lives. But in an effort to remember an old friendship, the bond seemed to come apart a little.

Some other opponents said they objected to an incense burning urn that is to be part of the Vietnamese-American monument. A few noted unhappily that some Vietnamese-Americans here continued to wear their old South Vietnamese military uniforms at special events. "

The excerpt barely touches this story by Monica Davey.   Please check the link to the full account.

This the first of two posts today that wring my heart and bring memories. (In fact I am becoming conviced of just how much we need old people with steel trap memories.  How dare we contemplate suicide, with or without government sponsored counseling!

In 40 short years this country has become so degraded one wonders can it recover. Then I recall we did at least temporarily after the previous  racist nativist effluence.  I want to write a whole ton on this and may do so later.  How readers must tire of hearing about "the way it was."

However... I grew up a hundred miles,  give or take,  from Wichita; an energetic and progressive small city that challenged Tulsa  in education and prosperity.

I knew well the mayor of Topeka the capital of Kansas for a number of years following Brown vs. BOE. A Republican he was a friend of the Landon and the Jimmy Carter families. Alf Landon that gentleman and Republican beloved in the middle of the coutry!  Some years after his defeat by Franklin Roosevelt he graciously acknowledged that Roosevelt's election had saved the country.

Nope these tortured veterans and their enablers are not the Kansas I knew.  But then neither is Tulsa.