Loyalty

The National Mall is the area between the Lincoln Memorial and the United States Capitol. It forms a sort of “Central Park” for Washington, DC. Originally conceived in 1791 by Pierre Charles L'Enfant as a grand avenue running between the Capitol building and the location of what is now the Washington Monument, the Mall has been expanded and greatly modified over the years.

The National Park Service states that the purposes of the National Mall are to:

• Provide a monumental, dignified, and symbolic setting for the governmental structures, museums and national memorials.
• Maintain and provide for the use of the National Mall with its public promenades as a completed work of civic art, a designed historic landscape providing extraordinary vistas to symbols of the nation.
• Maintain National Mall commemorative works (memorials, monuments, statues, sites, gardens) that honor presidential legacies, distinguished public figures, ideas, events, and military and civilian sacrifices and contributions.
• Forever retain the West Potomac Park section of the National Mall as a public park for recreation and enjoyment of the people.
• Maintain the National Mall in the heart of the nation's capital as a stage for national events and a preeminent national civic space for public gatherings because “it is here that the constitutional rights of speech and peaceful assembly find their fullest expression.”

It is here that our Presidents are inaugurated. It is here that We The People come to express our national pride. It is here that memorials of America’s past can be found. It is here that the symbols of our achievements as a nation can be seen in the Smithsonian Institution, the National Air and Space Museum, and numerous other museums and galleries which line the Mall. And it is here that we come to demonstrate, to protest, and to demand that our government live up to its promises.

Of all the gatherings which have taken place on the Mall, perhaps the most significant was “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” which took place in 1963. On August 28 of that year, the approximately 250,000 people who gathered here heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his most remembered speech:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today!

Sadly Dr. King’s hopes for jobs and real freedom have yet to be realized. But his dream and the hopes and dreams of countless millions of Americans continue to be expressed in the loyalty to our nation and to each other symbolized by the Mall, its monuments and memorials, and by the body of We The People who continue to gather here year after year to celebrate the glory of our United States of America.

From Chapter 9 of No More Patriots
Copyright © 2015 by Howard T. Uhal
All Rights Reserved

[Note: My copyright claim does not, of course, include the words of Dr. King, which I merely am quoting here.]