To the editor:
A monument can tell us where to stand. It cannot, by itself, teach us how to listen.
Your report on the Schoolboy Soldiers of Rippey monuments describes high school students taking an assignment about local Civil War history and helping transform it into something their neighbors can encounter for generations. What strikes me is not simply the size of the stone. It is the seriousness with which young people accepted responsibility for lives that ended long before theirs began.
Public memory is difficult work. We should honor sacrifice without making war seem romantic, and respect the dead without treating history as a contest to see whose grief matters more. Students who ask honest questions about their community’s past deserve adults willing to answer with care, humility and evidence.
My Christian faith calls me to honor others and to value truth, especially when truth is inconvenient. That conviction makes me grateful for projects in which students are more than spectators. They become stewards of stories, capable of seeing both courage and suffering in the same historical moment.
The finished memorial will remain in place when this year’s class graduates. The deeper achievement may be the habits the students take with them: researching before speaking, listening across generations and remembering that every name belongs to a person who had a life beyond the date carved in stone.
The best remembrance does not ask young people merely to admire the past. It invites them to become more careful with one another in the present.
Douglas B. Vandergraph
Fort Collins, Colorado
