I roamed around The Secret City Festival on Friday June 8th. It was a wonderful, great event with activities for kids and then, at night, there were two shows for nostalgic baby-boomers wanting to relive their youth. What’s not to love? It was wonderful. The festival organizers should be praised.
They provided a family friendly event which, besides the ORNL activities, was devoid of any kind of meaningful content about the history of Oak Ridge.
Attendees curious about history could stroll around the memory walk on the east end of Bissell Park and soak up a little history of the Secret City. If they were still curious and wanted more history, they could walk, almost a half mile, to the west end of the park, in 90 degree heat, cross the turnpike and see the exhibits at the Wildcat Den. They could soak up more history there, while standing in their sweat soaked shirts because of the major hike from the main festival site.
The festival organizers perfectly reflect the larger culture. Indulgent play events centered around children and then 40 year old bands for the baby boomers are what festival visitors want. History? We don’t need no stinking history!
Roaming the festival grounds everything was generic. The festival could’ve been in Powell or Farragut or Lenoir City. “Secret City Festival?” Not really. It should be renamed “The North Farragut Festival” or “Just Another Festival” for all that it promotes Oak Ridge.
I am a relic, a dinosaur; somebody who believes history can teach us how to conduct our lives today. A silly sentiment that looks naive.
The history of Oak Ridge is getting pummeled. Here are just a few examples.
1.) City council sells AMSE to a real estate developer who blackmailed the city council over the Main Street project. The developer’s message: no AMSE sale, no Main Street project.
A June 14th display of the new AMSE layout at the high school, showed that the Manhattan Project history will occupy 570 square feet of the exhibit space. The public bathrooms take up about the same sized space. DOE doesn’t care about the legacy of Oak Ridge.
2.) The national park service abandoned AMSE for the Children’s Museum to host their visitor’s information desk.
3.) Because of limitations of space, most of the ORHPA exhibits which in the past were in the civic center for the Secret City, were moved off the main festival site to the Wildcat Den, almost half mile away.
4.) The festival board dropped the World War II re-enactment from the Secret City Festival. The re-enactments were hugely popular with the public, drawing massive crowds, but they have been contentious among some locals who believed they glorified war.
5.) Both WBIR and The Knoxville News-Sentinel ran stories about photographer Ed Westcott being nominated for the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Local reaction on social media or news media outlets? Almost total silence.
6.) According to a WATE report, local groups, along with DOE contractors, quickly raised $700,000 for building a new pavilion for The Friendship Bell. The bell is a type of public atonement for the bombing of Hiroshima which, based on donations, the community strongly supports.
7.) Here is a quote from a WBIR report about the 2018 Secret City Festival.
“While the origins of this city were ground-breaking, the legacy of the last 75 years could be how the people have remained proud of the past without being stuck in it.” (emphasis is mine)
Pure speculation on my part, but I doubt the reporter created the quote on their own: a civic leader fed it to them, wanting to make a derogatory comment about local history buffs and take a swipe at military reenactors.
8.) A news report from the online edition for May 15, 2018 of Newsweek:
The report says a group of Japanese nationalists have demanded the National Park Service label Hiroshima and Nagasaki as war crimes in its Manhattan Project exhibits. Here is the reply from the park service.
“What we want to do is to make sure that we provide multiple and broad perspectives and not draw firm conclusions, but to leave those conclusions to our visitors, giving them the sovereignty of thought,” Manhattan Project National Historical Park Superintendent Kris Kirby said, according to the South China Morning Post.
Obviously, Kirby didn’t reject the idea, which was amazing to me.
In the spirit of Kirby’s comment, I offer a suggestion. There is a museum at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial next to Omaha Beach in France. Over 9,000 Americans are buried there. I would urge the museum there to expand their exhibits to include the perspectives of Germans during the war, for a balanced narrative presentation.
These are just a few examples of the assault on the legacy of Oak Ridge. It’s obvious that civic leaders want to run away from the Oak Ridge story as fast as they can.
Civic leaders look forward, not backwards. Fools wallow in the past, visionaries always look toward the future.
Across the country, communities are chasing after millennials to relocate to their cities. They are the hot new demographic. Millennials love propulsion sports. Visionaries believe Oak Ridge is perfectly positioned for the millennials. Civic leaders believe Oak Ridge can row and kayak its way to prosperity.
I am stuck in the past. Millennials mean nothing to me. What happened here during World War II is one of the great inspirational stories of American history. Nobody cares.
If I was a visionary I guess I would understand.