I think you may be preaching to the choir here Tom. I have had those same moments when I wonder just why in the world some people consider some graves more important than others. Other people's heritage more important. It's upsetting and disgusting. I have to just tell myself caring for my own ancestors graves is about all I can handle and I hope I've made a few grands come with me enough that they will at least check them out after I'm gone. I'm lucky that 3 are buried almost together in the same cemetery and it's close to my house. We are going through the process of getting this cemetery into one of the historical catagories. It can fit into a couple of them. We also have regular clean up days and are assisted by the young service members from Corry Station and NAS Pensacola as part of their community volunteer program. There are a lot of former soldiers from the Confederate States in this cemetery and no one has said anything negative about cleaning their graves that I know of.

Week before last we had a car go through the beautiful old iron fence at our most historic cemetery, St Michael's, in downtown Pensacola. The young woman driving the car was trying to see who had called her cell and she missed the call. Six old graves were damaged and this was about the 3rd incident with a car meeting the fence in the last few years. Hurricane Ivan had already done enough damage in 2004 but we still have idiots with a drivers license.
This cemetery is pretty much managed by the Historical Society and the Archaeologist at University of West Florida. This last car just missed my Mother in Law's grave by a couple of feet. Stephen R. Mallory is buried here and his grave is maintained and has the Battle Flag flying over it. Delity Powell is also buried there and she has a marker with the flag placed there by the SCV. This is a huge change from just a couple of decades ago. At that time, the cemetery was a mess, no one really bothered to maintain it and there had been a number of grave vandals.Then some group came in to clean it up and they hauled the fallen headstones they found to the dump. No, I'm not kidding. We don't know what happened to the Iron Cross that marked my 3xGGrandfather's grave. It went missing in the early 1900's. Now it is a National Historic Treasure and no one can do anything to it without going through a lot of paperwork.

We can only do what we ourselves can and there's just no way to convince others that graves are not meant to be ignored. Taking bust of a historic Confederate person seems to be not quite as important as when someone dumped white paint on mlk's bust downtown a few years back. That almost started another war.

Pam