artist : Dale Heinzerling
medium : bronze
title : Unknown Student
(commissioned by Rochdale College,
Bloor St.W., Toronto, Ontario, Canada. 1970)

Many have taken to calling this eleventh day of the eleventh month – Remembrance Day. Set aside, at 11:11 a.m., millions poise to remember what we all have wrought/sacrificed/won/lost in acts of war.

When I was a child the expression past wars was used to invoke the requisite memory.

What now shall we remember? What now, downstream, now in the current of warring with one another? What now when I remind you there is no other, only one?

I have been walking and listening these days.

I listen to a lot of radio.

Last week I heard a story about Kent State University – four dead students in Ohio, spring, 1970.

Students were gathered to protest the American war in Vietnam. National Guardsmen were called in to contain, control and dissemble them. For reasons I may never understand the Guardsmen arrived armed to the teeth with armour-piercing bullets. I leave it to you to line up hyperlinks and peer into not-so-distant history for details. It suffices for me to say : the Guardsmen, so inexplicably armed against college students, opened fire in the blink of an eye.

The students, the Guardsmen, the armour-piercing bullets, all rose up in the open air for an invisible instant, moving/moved with inevitability. Two students taking part in the protest were killed. Two students on their way to classes also tried unsuccessfully not to get shot and died on the ground with their colleagues.

At that precise moment appeared conflicting versions of “Whom, How, Why?”, still doing battle, even now.

War will not lie down, it seems.

Bullets designed to cut through tank armour killed four students and wounded nine on a university campus.

Public art, also caught in the crossfire, yet wears the scar of a bullet passing through 3/4″ thick sheet-metal – effortlessly.

Lest we forget : war is always on the horizon and Millions die one by one.

I’m through with looking for someone to blame – neither you nor me. My heart is broken in too many places.

I pray for all the people and a deeper understanding.

AMEN

dig. photo : r. e. macKinnon
where : Bloor ST.W., Toronto, Ont., Canada
when : 11/10/06