Posted by John Gray Wallace
on 10/9/2009, 10:02 pm
70.162.22.105
Just amazed at all the concern here in recent weeks for an inanimate piece of stone---at a time when the world is precariously perched upon the precipice of financial ruin---and nuclear war,if Iran "gets" "The Bomb".
In our culture, we do not build things to last, as did the Greeks (the Parthenon), the Romans (the Coloseum), the Incans (Macchu Picchu) or the Egyptians (the Pyramids). We don't even build our cars and appliances to last. When the history of the fall of the Detroit automakers is finally written, it may be written in just two words; PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE.
The Polo Grounds are gone. Old Madison Square Garden is gone. Three Rivers Stadium is gone. Frank D. Lawrence Stadium, too, is gone. In our culture, this is just the way it is.
The great expatriate American poet Ezra Pound once said that the true test of a civilization is in the quality of the ruins it leaves behind. By that measure, millenia from now, the universe "may little note, nor long remember" what we have done on this little blue planet. HOWEVER, if old Ezra was wriong, and if, say, the true measure of a civilization is in the quality of the men (and women) it produces, then the exploits of Ramses, Hannibal, Perikles, Ceasar, Lincoln and even some of the alumni of dear old Wilson High will "long be remembered".
And therein, I submit, is the true value of Wilson High, in the quality of the young men and women it has turned out and launched into adult Life from its hallowed halls, whether from the old downtown location, or from the one on Willet Drive, or from the one now at the corner of Elmhurst Lane and Cherokee Road.
The fate of the cornerstone, I must admit, concerns me not a whit. The fate of our world and our species, however, does. Therefore I urge the men and women of Wilson High to immerse themselves in matters which matter. And to abandon this (to me, anyway) silly "Crusade" to save something not only already dead but which never lived (the cornerstone).
A school is not a building, it is a collection of people, students, faculty, administrators and maintenance people, who come together in a place to make learning come alive in the students' minds and imaginations. It is no more a structure than is a church. If anything, a school might be likened, at its best, to a cathedral of learning. For those who remember Wilson High this way, it will live eternally in our hearts and souls, and needs no surviving physical remnant of itself to preserve its place in our memories.
John Gray Wallace
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