Natural Bridge, Wikimedia Commons

by John McFerren Re: the editorial “Protect Virginia’s natural wonder,” May 30:

I agree that the Natural Bridge should be preserved for future generations; however, I found one remark very upsetting.

You mentioned the wax museum as a tourist trap when, in fact, the Natural Bridge Wax Museum was researched very carefully so it would be a historical connection to the Natural Bridge, and tell the stories, folklore and legends of Natural Bridge and the surrounding area.

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McFerren is the manager of the Natural Bridge Wax Museum.

At last, a date is in sight to complete the Roanoke River Greenway.

Years from now, when the local history of the Roanoke River Greenway is written, lots of names will need to be mentioned. Liz Belcher’s is just one, but the key one: the one who brought it off.

She’s in the process, with a date for completion in sight: 2017. The Roanoke River Greenway remains a work in progress, with Belcher at the helm. But the Roanoke Valley’s regional transportation planning agency’s recent decision to award $12.7 million to the project clears the biggest obstacle remaining to extending the greenway the full 21 miles planned: a sure source of funding.

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Wikimedia

Natural Bridge and its surroundings are for sale. Virginia needs to purchase and finally protect this natural treasure.

by Donald A. Stadler

Having written on strong driving-under-the-influence laws, and having taken a profoundly positive stance, I’d like to back off that a bit. There currently is a movement to reduce the prima facie proof of impairment by alcohol from a blood alcohol content, or BAC, of .08 percent to .05 percent. This is stupidly wrong.

Forty years ago, Vermont was premier in instituting an aggressive program to reduce highway deaths. It was wildly successful. Deaths due to DUI were reduced by 40 percent within two years. I was tangentially involved in the program, even though I became administrator of the Vermont Health Department a year later. My minor part was to deliver a lecture to convicted DUIs. More on that later.

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Stadler is a retired consultant. He lives in Southwest Roanoke County.

Wikimedia Commons

Today we remember the history of Memorial Day, first known as Decoration Day, a time to remember those who died for their country.

Memorial Day’s origins can be traced back to many communities where residents gathered each year to honor those who died in battle.

It became an official holiday in May 1868, when Gen. John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, issued the proclamation below.

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By Suchitra Samanta

It’s been 20 years that so-called “comfort women,” abducted and forced into prostitution by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II, have spoken out about this atrocity. Yet Osaka’s mayor, Toru Hashimoto, has offered his explanation that soldiers at war need “rest,” which women provide (“Comfort women were necessary, mayor says,” The Roanoke Times, May 15).

In 2007, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sang the same refrain. However, where 80 percent of the estimated 200,000 enslaved women were Korean, Abe said then that his cabinet would stand by the apology rendered to South Korea in 1993. But is an apology enough?

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Samanta is an assistant professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Department of Sociology, Virginia Tech.

by Glenn Rose

It’s a good thing automobiles weren’t invented when the Constitution of the United States was being written. Our Founding Fathers may have felt compelled to add an amendment outlining the horseless carriage’s place in our society. It might have read, “While recognizing these contraptions are unreliable and most likely a passing fad, the right of the people to own and operate Automobiles shall not be infringed.”

No doubt we would now have another N.R.A., the National Right to Automobiles, resisting any laws to regulate and control the use of motorized vehicles, now far more pervasive in our society, far more powerful, and far more lethal than in their infancy.

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Rose is a former educator, broadcaster, and business owner living in Rockbridge County.

by John Freivalds

In our nation’s history, immigrants have never been totally welcome. This goes against the common belief that the Statue of Liberty guarding New York harbor has always welcomed all with the words engraved on its pedestal: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

After all these inspiring words, where shall we begin? How about with saintly portrayed Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, who warned that Germans are too stupid to learn English and, therefore, represent a political threat to America. He adds, “French, Russians and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion, as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted who with the English make up the principal Body of White People on the face of the Earth . . . . Why should we in the sight of superior beings darken its people? . . . But perhaps I am particular to the Complexion of my Country for such kind of Partiality of natural to Mankind.”

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Freivalds runs an international communications firm in Lexington.

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by John Long

Campus was a buzz of activity Saturday as I crossed over to the chapel. Commencement was in a few hours; good seats were already being claimed; boxes of programs were stacked; the band was warming up. But I was there for another reason at that early hour: the commissioning of an officer into the United States Marine Corps.

Tim Wolfe was one of my students this past semester; he was enrolled in my class on the history of World War II and seemed to enjoy it. He especially enjoyed the required reading of “Flags of our Fathers,” the stirring tale of the five Marines and one Navy corpsman who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, as immortalized in the famous photograph. I was flattered to receive an invitation to his ceremony, given we’d only met in January.

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Long, a Roanoke Times columnist, is director of the Salem Museum.

By Jason Husser

Washington Parish in Louisiana sure doesn’t look like the cutting edge of anything, much less a place at the front lines of racial reconciliation, but a milestone event in American history is happening in a poor rural community with about as many alligators as people.

In 1965, during the height of the civil rights movement, a group of suspected Ku Klux Klan members piled into a pickup somewhere near the village of Varnado. They proceeded to ambush the patrol car of the first two black deputy sheriffs in the parish. Creed Rodgers was severely injured and Oneal Moore, a 34-year-old father of four and Army veteran, was assassinated in a hate crime.

Almost half a century later, a region that wrought such horror and injustice is doing something right. It is remembering. Sheriff Randy “Country” Seal has started the process of building a memorial to Moore in the entrance of his department’s very modest headquarters in my childhood hometown.

This memorial, and many like it throughout the country, may seem inconsequential, but memorials are so much more. Places like the International Civil Rights Museum in North Carolina, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., Ground Zero, or the forthcoming and admittedly more modest Fallen Heroes Memorial in Washington Parish serve a higher social purpose. They are embodiments of memories.

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Husser is an assistant professor of political science and assistant director of the Elon University Poll. He can be reached at jhusser@elon.edu.