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Categories - Copywriting - Shopping - Free Online Business Help - Telecommunications Services Articles: Self - The Cross There is a cross in the middle of the desert, outside of Barstow, that has been turned into a Supreme Court case. A former parks employee named Frank Buono got insulted and threatened by the cross, which was put up by a handful of people from the VFW as a wooden WWI memorial in 1934, and the ACLU is arguing on his behalf. Since it is on property claimed by the federal government, he wants it removed and has managed to get an injunction covering the cross, which was replaced with a metal one in the 1990s, with plywood.
Having been stationed at Edwards for 3 years in the early 70s, my first impression was that I was going to be stuck out in the middle of nowhere for a length of time doing something to be determined somehow by a bureaucracy with thoughts and processes that only they could understand. Someday, without warning, I would find paperwork in my mailbox and I would be off to some other place for reasons not explained or understood by normal human beings, but I would go. In the meantime, not being one to sit around drinking beer, I got to know the desert very well.
As I soon discovered, from the back of a new motorcycle, that what looks so barren to people just passing through is actually teaming with life, adventure, and something that you can't put your hands on. At first venturing out only with other riders, I would soon find myself drawn to be out in the desert alone, which my fellow riders understood, but strongly advised against. I went out often anyway.
As the a desert grew on me and I got to know the civilians on the base who had chosen to live there, one of them mentioned that I should visit the cross. Not being especially religious, my first thoughts were of people who had been driven by their isolation to do something that might give their lives meaning. When I arrived at the cross on my motorcyle, I was immediately struck, not by religion, but by a sense of humanity, peace, and freedom. I imagined the people who had chosen to express their strongest feelings, without expectation of acclamation, out in the middle of nowhere. I climbed up next to the cross and sat there for an hour just looking around. The cross had more meaning than any monument ever errected.
When I got back to the base and mentioned my visit to the guy, a fellow named Shorty who lived in a trailer on 100 deserted acres with a small herd of horses and his wife, who had told me about it, and told him that it simply felt good to be there, he said, "It means different things to different people". He understood and I understood.
What is impossible to understand is the pathology of hatred, absurdity, and loneliness, now pervading society and the government, that will not just let people be.
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