Seventy years ago today, Mount Rushmore was completed. I tried to imagine what people hundreds or thousands of years from now will think of the faces carved into the stone. Today at the bank, a woman didn't know who John Hancock was or the reference when I signed some paperwork. What would Lewis and Clark have thought to find something like that carved into the mountain as they explored?
This weekend, as I have several times in the past few years, I hiked to an area in the desert southwest marred by graffiti. In order to mark these areas, people had to plan ahead and go far out of their way. Most of it mars the landscape, much like a great scar on an otherwise beautiful face. It really makes me feel sad.
Centuries and millenia from now, I suspect Mount Rushmore will be viewed as an irreparable form of 'American Graffiti'. It will come to symbolize how certain Americans tried to overwrite what was with what they thought ought to be. There was once a time when America was the bastion of propriety, where although you might get ripped off by someone dishonest or hurt by someone's immorality, it wasn't guaranteed like it was elsewhere. As we have grown more prosperous, we have done away with that.
Although long forgotten, American Pioneer and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints president Brigham Young was sensitive of man's impact on the world. When he arrived in Deseret Territory of Spanish Mexico, which is now the state of Utah, he worked hard to keep harmony with the land. Few American pioneers won the respect of so many natives. However, Brigham worried back then, at a time when Jim Bridger scoffed at the notion that Brigham would ever grow wheat in the Salt lake valley, that people would become too prosperous. He proved prescient.
Parts of American culture graffiti over what is good and brave and beautiful. Too many people confuse what happens on TV with reality. We forget that people go to the movies to escape reality, because if our lives were really like that, we would never pay to see those films. No longer concerned with survival, in our prosperity we turn to bread and circuses, drugs and intercourse, pleasure and pelf for substance. We forget that semblance does not equal substance as we concern ourselves with appearances. We think that the hotter the car the better the person. We fear who we are that we can't wait for Halloween and Renaissance Faires so we can get away acting the way we wish we were. Even worse, to reinforce these misbegotten notions we dress up our children and send them out to extort candy from strangers under veiled threats of violence. What will we leave behind?
I think it's interesting that they chose the Statue of Liberty as the symbol of ruined civilization in the Planet of the Apes series. America was supposed to be freedom, opportunity, and possibility. It does not mean guaranteed outcomes, equality, or indulgence. We have been bridled by unbroken success and seen Brigham Young's fear come true- that we would become too prosperous for our own good. We focus on the Kardashians and Charlie Sheen and the NFL and Barack Obama instead of actually doing things worth doing, discussing things worth discussing, and becoming something worth becoming. The broadcast of our media shows any other denizens of the galaxy that we are obsessed with things of no worth and disinterested in things that matter.
As a close friend pointed out, those messages we leave will reverberate forever. Even if monuments like Mt. Rushmore fall, what we are will endure. We are all made of matter and creating energies, and our own science tells us that our matter and energy will always exist. Rather than focusing on shaky morals and pretending to care about things, let us be something. Let us be something worth remembering, something that other beings on other worlds are interested in knowing more about us. We can be for something. We can be involved in something. We can be proactive rather than passive recipients. Either we can wait on the world to change and protest in the streets or we can do something that might actually make a difference. Rather than leave behind monuments and cave art or even stone clocks and cement ruins, let us leave behind great thoughts and great principles and great deeds, stories worth the retelling. Let that be the kind of American Graffiti that survives us.
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