Pray for the Dead and the Dead will Pray for You

I'm in a mood this morning. It's a funky warm, unpleasant global warming sort of day -- warm enough for t-shirts on January 8th, dead of winter. We still have young women and men in Iraq, a war that's now gone on longer than World War II. And the world is becoming more agitated, with great growing numbers of angry young men in the Middle East, more disruption of our natural resources, precipitous daily declines in biodiversity. It just puts a girl in a mood. So, here's a little news item from when I was a young thing, a sweet little 4 year-old girl, getting ready to go to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Indeed, here is a photo of Bascom Hall in 1968 when students overnight put up a protest against the Vietnam War. Good rocking kids.

A Dignified Protest, published Friday, March 29, 1968 in Time Magazine.
Neatly arrayed in graveyard rows, the 435 thin white crosses ranged down the sloping mall in front of Bascom Hall, the University of Wisconsin's main administration building. All through the rainy afternoon a cortege of mock mourners shuffled past. As they marched slowly up the hill, past a sign reading BASCOM MEMORIAL CEMETERY, CLASS OF 1968, the solemn students chanted: "Pray for the dead and the dead will pray for you; pray for the dead."
The low-key protest was planned by a senior history major from Washington, D.C., who hoped that the instant cemetery would symbolize the fact that today's "students really are faced with death." Some 60 students worked for two days to assemble the crosses, then planted them hurriedly, fearful that they might be accused of damaging the lawn. But university authorities, impressed by one of the most dignified—and wholly nonviolent—anti-Viet Nam demonstrations of the academic year, left the crosses untouched all day long. They were removed the next morning by campus maintenance men.