Greensburg —
The community lost more than four people in that plane crash.
It lost leaders, sources of benevolent energy that make any group or municipality thrive. We mourn for the families and friends, because their loss is immeasurable, but I take it upon myself to say that we should mourn as well the loss of their example.
The whole idea of community depends on our being entangled in each others’ lives, with a shared vision. Within our particular community in Decatur County, the deceased had become so interwoven into the fabric of our daily lives that we notice immediately the hole they leave. They are not just statistics, faceless fatalities. The world is full of those every day. No, they have been more.
The energy toward community, the forces that bring us tighter, operate here and there, in surprising places. Not all of them are politicians or pastors. Leadership is where you find it, pulsating from good hearts animated on behalf of the whole. Most of us knew these people as leaders.
So what happens next? There will be private grief and hardship for some. The families will enfold the orphans in security and love. For some time now, we will pause for a moment and catch ourselves staring into space. The sage will ponder. The poet will compose a verse. But the community has to confront a big question, a question that most of us aren’t ready to answer, and that is this: who will assume responsibility for leadership next? Who will take up their example?
I keep this column simple. It is enough, I think, to ask the question, for we are all diminished by the loss. Let us be equally encouraged to memorialize them through our actions. That is all I wanted to say tonight.
Columns
In Memoriam
- Columns
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Camp Lejuene vets may be entitled to medical assistance
Last year, on Aug. 6, President Obama signed into law the “Honoring America’s Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act of 2012.”
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The mound builders of the Woodland Period
About 1000 B.C. marks the beginning of a new period for man in North America.
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Fit for a king, priced for the common man
In the early 1900’s the art glass market was ruled by the Tiffany family.
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The Old Copper Indians
The Old Copper Indians, were a unique division of Boreal Archaic, so named because its Indian carriers used raw copper for making specific kinds of knives, spear ponts, socketed axes, gouges, pikes and awls.
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Home remedies, recipes and the best time to plant your garden
Unique in it’s contents and inexplicably accurate, the “Old Farmer’s Almanac” stands as the oldest continuously published periodical in North America.
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June flowers on the way?
It looks like the April showers are carrying into May.
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Historic bar and World War II slave labor
You may remember Tom Keating, who for several years wrote an Indianapolis Star column.
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Hoosier soil on veterans’ graves
Butch Kennedy and his son Shane did something rather marvelous. When the two were going to Europe some years ago they dug up some Indiana earth from around his land at Smith’s Crossing and took it with them to Europe.
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The post-war trials of WWI vets
It is appropriate to remember that the United States entered World War I 96 years ago this month, that the Civil War began 152 years ago this month, and that the Desert Storm Cease Fire was this month in 1991.
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A positive minute: What a time
As I write these words this morning I am also listening to Boston police communications.
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