In my last column I told how the local VFW and its Auxiliary sent Lori and me to Washington D.C. to see our son Thomas take part in the national Voice of Democracy Parade of Winners.  And though we didn’t have much time there, we saw as many sights as possible.

I was concerned that it might be difficult to get to all the monuments, but it was soon clear that Washington is set up to accommodate visitors since it enshrines the history and ideals of our nation.

People sometimes speak about things being “carved in stone,” but usually this is said facetiously since few things actually are.

Which makes it all the more striking when an idea IS etched in stone, as many are on the monuments in Washington.  These stand as permanent reminders of the ideals that form the foundation of our nation, there to remind us of who we are and where we come from.   And they remind us as well of the price some, like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., have paid for championing equality and justice.

What has long made America “great,” made America stand out like the proverbial “shining city on a hill,” are our ideals.  Inequality and injustice can be found everywhere.  It’s our continuing struggle to overcome them that has shaped America, and Washington is rife with reminders quite literally carved in stone.

At a time when bigotry and xenophobia threaten the rights of minorities and immigrants, words etched in the Lincoln Memorial remind us that America was “…conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”  At a time when income inequality has never been greater and anti-labor sentiments rule the day, Lincoln’s words also condemn allowing the privileged class to wring “… their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces…”

The FDR Memorial reinforces the same ideals: With regard to equality FDR said “We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.” And at a time when the Environmental Protection Agency stands to lose most if its authority, we would do well to recall FDR’s statement that “Men and nature must work hand in hand. The throwing out of balance of the resources of nature throws out of balance also the lives of men.”

And then there was the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. Here, even two highly vocal Trump supporters in our tour group were brought to silence by the power of such inscriptions as “I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits” and “…our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class…”

These are just a few of our nation’s ideals so important they are carved in stone.  And they remind us that the struggle against inequality and injustice never ends.

Today, the prevailing opinion seems to be that we can only become “great again” by turning our back on our ideals. But as our nation abandons the “great American experiment” of governance based on equality and justice, those of us who still cherish these precepts must never forget that, as the King Memorial reminds us, “…the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

That is, after all, carved in stone.