But how do we do that?
Back in 1929, a career parks man named Carl P. Russell wrote: "Any plan involving assistance to the visitor must include an examination of the attitude of the park visitor to what is presented. We are not concerned merely with the fact that many things may be large or wide or deep or highly colored or have an interesting evolutionary development. . . . From the point of view of the visitor, we are interested in their meaning to them in terms of their most fundamental thinking, and their significance in relationship to their everyday lives."
And we do that because nothing in our care matters if it can't be related to people. We have to look at what matters in their lives and help them see how what we are doing relates to that.
A generation before Carl Russell, the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana taught us a simple, stark truth: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The horrors of history, once forgotten, can be revived. That's too high a price to ignore; it's too great a responsibility to neglect.
To keep the story--and its context--alive, we now have this magnificent center. I see the Richmond Civil War Visitor Center as a shrine to the spirit of Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune's wise counsel to, in her words, "always have a thirst for education."
We are now a generation removed from America's last great military conflict. It increases the burden on us to do our job better. I won't shed a tear because this generation hasn't personally learned the meaning of war--or even the meaning of readiness for war. I might, however, shed a tear because they have no understanding of the reasons for war--the causes, events, and circumstances that would justify putting the best of our youth in harm's way for a higher purpose.
We have long taken responsibility for explaining the mechanics of war--the availability, use, and evolution of strategy. . . tactics. . . logistics. But we've left it to the old warriors, the successive generations of fighters themselves, to tell the children, friends, and neighbors why they did what they did.
It was safe for us and in its way, it was successful, too. But the trouble with informal systems is that they break down. Sadly, we were so unused to the notion of an entire generation without a serious breakout of armed hostility, we didn't consider how that message would be carried forward in such circumstances.
My message to you is as direct as any soldier's war story: It's them or us. And it's better if it's us.
We must tell the stories of why, not just the stories of who, what, where, when and how. And as any reporter will tell you, "why" is a lot harder to tell.
The interplay of conflicting and overlapping reasons is a great challenge. But it is a challenge we must not shy away from. To go to war without a reason would be a national shame. To tell of war without the reasons should be no less so. . . .
I'm proud that right here, we are beginning the new millennium with a new perspective. Right here, we now have an exhibit that says forthrightly: "More than seventy years after the adoption of the Constitution, a nation founded on principles of liberty and equality still allowed human enslavement and quarreled over the balance between state and federal powers. These interrelated issues led to Constitutional crises that were merely patched over, satisfying neither North nor South." On to page 3.