As we continue to build our new Village Square community both in our hometowns and nationally, Memorial Day weekend, I think, is the right time to talk about the history of the “Threads of A Nation” quilt we occasionally use on our website (and we have in bumper stickers for sale). Many years ago, before I realized that if you spent 14 million hours on a project it was hard to sell it for a profit, I wanted to be a textile artist. I made my first “Threads of a Nation” quilt well before September 11th, as a tribute to my father, brother and grandfather who all served in the military, and to my father-in-law who died in Vietnam. The quilt incorporates a rubbing of his name off the Vietnam memorial. It’s 5 x 7 feet in size.
To get the rubbing, I bought a pad of nice paper and brought a fistful of pencils to the Mall in Washington one day. Other people visiting the wall, all of whom I suppose had some part of themselves etched in granite there, asked me if they could borrow paper and pencil to do their own rubbings. We stood at that wall, some ten or so strangers, connected briefly in common pursuit… leaning and rubbing. I left, short a few pencils and all out of paper, with my rubbing on a single piece of paper and the memory – another thread in the quilt, I suppose.
When I first imagined “Threads of A Nation,” I wanted it to depict the dreams and hopes, the principles, the struggle and heartbreak, the achievement that is woven into the fabric of America. I used ethnic and contrasting fabrics that, as the individuals who together make our country, strain against each other close up, but once assembled make a whole – one with more depth and richness than were all the pieces similar. Among the words printed on the fabric are passages from the Constitution and Gettysburg address which embody both the idea of what this new country could be and the bitter divisions that have strained our union, leaving the threads of our nation worn but not broken.
Today, these ideas seem somehow more real, more important, less theoretical than in the days when I first committed them to fabric. Today, we must take special care to remember the principles on which this country was founded. We must remember that a great insight of our Founders’ was that diversity of opinion could be a strength in governing a country. I believe we need to seek out this diversity to counteract the trends toward tribal division and building fury toward one another. We’ve spent a decade doing that at the Village Square and it really does change everything. Today, we must see how deeply we are all “threads” in the whole. It is these principles that the men and women who have lost their lives for our country were serving.
Today, Memorial Day, it is the day to remember – and honor – what those who fought and died gave for this country that they, like us, love.
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Liz Joyner is the cofounder of the Village Square. You can reach her at liz@tothevillagesquare.org.
