“Is Nothing Sacred?”

“And this is exacerbated by a situatedness in a contemporary culture that has removed the sort of guardrails that would tell a would-be troublemaker that to defile something like a grave or a tribute to those lost in a mass casualty terrorist attack is unacceptable…”

In honor of the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, a group of students at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri placed 2,977 American flags on Mudd Field, a grass lawn at the center of campus. There was one for each victim of the terrorist attacks. It was a kind tribute on the part of these college students, many of whom would have been infants or even yet to be born at the time of the attacks. However, shortly after the scene was set, a Washington University student by the name of Fadel Alkilani was caught on video uprooting the flags and cramming them into a series of blue trash bags. When later questioned as to why he would do such a thing, Alkilani sought to justify his actions by saying they were an act of protest against the American military interventions that took place in the wake of September 11th and “American imperialism” more broadly, as if the victims of these attacks were complicit in the sorts of foreign policy decisions that Alkilani decries. (And this is not even to mention that American interventions in Afghanistan in response to the attacks were, at least initially, not only justified but also constituted a moral and security imperative.)

The Mudd Field incident was just one in a series of recent acts of vandalism across the United States, where American flags honoring the dead were targeted for defacement. Just days before, on or around September 8th, a series of American flags draped over a highway wall in Riverside, California to honor the 13 American service members killed in Afghanistan on August 26th was ripped apart. And, on the evening of July 3rd, 21 American flags placed at a cemetery in Anderson, South Carolina in honor of veterans buried there were found burned in a heap, the second time this had happened at that cemetery within the past two years.

This also comes at a time when Canada has borne witness to four of its Catholic Churches, along with an Anglican Church, being burned to the ground this summer. (Grace Presbyterian Church in Calgary was also covered in red graffiti on July 3rd.) Here, in the United States, the lust for vandalism has extended beyond just graveside flags to grave markers themselves, such as with the February, 2021 vandalism of an Atlanta cemetery containing 3,000 unknown Confederate war dead. The increasingly frequent ransacking of gravesites, a maniacal practice that should have been confined to some of the most regrettable historical cases such as the 1793 destruction of tombs at the Basilica of Saint-Denis, is something I warned against also in my June, 2020 Merion West essay “And They’ve Come for the Founders” when condemning the desecration of a memorial to unknown American casualties of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. Yet, it has continued, as memorial after memorial has been targeted for defilement.