In the 16th century, an English Protestant named John Bradford witnessed condemned criminals being walked up scoffolding, where they would be hanged for their supposed crimes. Some may have been poor people who stole to feed themselves or their families. Others were relgious heretics. Others may have been murderers, or possibly they too were poor people defending themselves against the tyranny of wealth. Bradford lived in a society that at the time did not accept him or many others that did not follow a strict conformance to the so-called rules of decent society and felt the best way to handle these people was to execute them, often with as much pain as possible. Not too many years distant, Bradford himself was burned at the stake as a religious heretic. But back then, when seeing these people led to their deaths, he reportedly uttered the phrase, "There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford," which has subsequently transformed into a common refrain spoken by those who realize that the fact they have not yet suffered a worse fate than they have is often a matter of luck or of grace, if you believe in it.
A couple weeks ago I was walking past the Vietnam memorial. It was the first time I had seen it in person, and my first thought upon walking into the universe controlled by the monument's borders was simply a trite expression. Words do not do justice. I felt suffocated. Powerful emotions ran through me I had not expected. My father's generation was on that wall. Another generation of my contemporaries will be etched in stone from another national disgrace in the deserts of the Middle East. Yet, I am here, mentally commenting on it all. The icy wind blew through my clothes, but I scarcely felt it as I became hot from an internal combustion of emotion that was starting to flow out of me. Before I left the memorial I cried a little, compelled subconciously by the enormity of the moment to express at least some level of what I felt at seeing all those names and that black, mirrored, ascending wall that fell off again to point at which one name, the last name, was present.
I looked at one of the panels. I saw myself and my friend in it. I saw the names. Throngs of people passed by us, and I couldn't focus. I wanted to capture the moment because something about it, something not yet reaching my conscious centers of reasoning, had compelled me to look and to notice what I was seeing. I waited, patiently, my camera pointed down, not making a sound, not looking this way or that but straight ahead, waiting, waiting for a space to open. The moment one presented itself, mere seconds of time were available, and I took this picture, which I have cropped only to remove the somewhat disoriented illusion of tilt due to the construction of the monument itself.
The first words into my head as I looked at the picture were simple, "There but for the grace of God go I ..."
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