There is still a future for the younger generation.
Via Free Lance Star:
Two girls paused in front of a tombstone at the Fredericksburg National Cemetery as their classmates planted flags in front of other graves.
A pale-green lichen, a sort of fungus, was growing on a granite marker, and sixth-grader Madeline Leonard told Leah Werme that she wanted it gone.
“I was scraping it off so you could see his name,” Madeline said, adding that the soldier buried there deserved at least that much.
When Kirsten Talken–Spaulding walked by and heard the story, she was noticeably moved. She’s the National Park Service’s new superintendent of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park.
That morning, Talken–Spaulding had been thinking about her father, Navy pilot George Talken, who died in Vietnam when she was a child. She was comforted, knowing someone would be placing a flag on his grave at Arlington Cemetery.
The notion of a preteen showing the same compassion for a Civil War soldier moved her to tears.
“These kids probably have no concept of who these men were or what their lives were like, yet they have a strong sense of caring,” she said. “You can’t teach that.”
There were plenty of teachable moments Friday morning on the rolling grounds of the Fredericksburg cemetery, where flags rippled in a balmy breeze as soon as they were placed.
About 40 sixth-graders from Fredericksburg Christian School volunteered for the duty on the terraced hills where 15,300 Civil War soldiers are buried.