I am writing this on December 24th shortly after walking Rabia in four degrees with a minus-sixteen windchill. By the time you read this we’ll be peering into fifty degree weather.
My first thought is biographical — a memoir of Rabia’s short life. She will turn nine in a few months but is too vain to admit it. Her first three years were enjoyed in Vermont. A real minus-sixteen was not unheard of on our nighttime walks up on the border with Quebec. She loved it and the snow. The deeper the better. I would throw a snowball in one direction and as she got to it — nosing into the snow to find it — I would throw one in the opposite direction. Off she would bound like a deer. Back and forth, back and forth. My arm would get sore before she tired of the play.
Not this morning. After doing her business I found myself pulling her home because her paws were so cold she didn’t want to take another step. Poor thing, she didn’t want to stand still but it hurt too much to go forward. I took her leash off as soon as we were in sight of the house and told her to go home while I went to the dumpster with a knotted green baggie. She darted to the porch, turned around and sat to make sure I was coming. “Go on,” I shouted above the wind. She turned and headed to the porch. When I turned back toward the house from the dumpsters she was sitting on the edge of the porch starring at me, just waiting.
She has forgotten all that wintry play just like you, dear reader of the future week, have forgotten what minus-sixteen feels like. We can remember the idea of pain but not the actual feel of it, at least most of us don’t have acutely sensual memory. Our memories have limited ability to hold sensation and that is a definite liability as we walk into the new year.
A significant swath of the public is like Rabia was this morning, not wanting to stand still but resisting the pain of moving forward toward an honest reckoning. Trump aside, there are millions of Americans who support the sentiments of the January 6th Capital rioters and who seem ready to blow up what is, in favor of whatever is not what is. There is no single ideology or vision guiding that toxicity. If indeed there is a battle for the soul of the nation, it has stalemated and in the interim we have lost our soul.
Moving forward requires remembering that our Founders defined Black Americans as less than fully human and enshrined slavery. Moving forward means remembering the genocide conducted against indigenous peoples, naming the ways we violently persecuted LBGQT people, and the means used to restrict the social, economic, and political participation of women. Memory is required to move forward.
While there is a solid core of the MAGA body politic that consciously aims and desires to reactivate the violence we have done to select groups within our society, some of them have hearts and minds yet able to be redeemed by a broad and intentional act of collective memory. Going forward means remembering what we have done and left undone, so that we resolve to never do them again.
Hello Cam. Good morning and Merry Christmas- I want to know, when you say, “redeemed by a broad and intentional act of collective memory”, what that looks like for you. Can you flesh that out for me a little bit? Thanks.
I guess I was thinking about something like the South African Truth Commission and Reparations, something we do as a nation to name the sins of our country and meaningful gestures that demonstrate remorse and hope of redemption. Not sure exactly what it would look like but radically more than anything the has been done.
Thanks, Cam.
Now we have lying Santos from Nassau County; and by that I mean that any collective memory is more remote than even Herr Trump’s; his favorite example (sorry, not his but mine) of either “zero memory” or disrespect of the same. It happened early into his white House years, when he visited a French cemetery for a D-Day Commemoration. He was obviously unprepared, and entirely unashamed about his lack of understanding – the significance of rows and rows of military headstones, all bearing the names of American “kids” who had died trying – with their lives – to liberate the French people from Nazism. My recall informs me that he wondered about as though a blind man might, or as one would who has never heard of WW Two and the lives lost on the behalf of freedom. I believe he asked a question of an aid or a security personnel, that went something like, “What’s this all about?” Therein lies much of the American collective memory – at least my optimism for the potential fomenting within the “MAGA Crowd.” With apologies for the rambling. Blame age – I do.
“Old man, take a look at my eyes, I’m a lot like you…” Happy New Year’s Ed!
Our ten-year-old Golden has come to the place in his life, where, after about 15 minutes out on his walks in pretty much the same weather, he’d try to levitate on all but one leg, and we are reminded that last year we considered getting boots for him. But today? Today was the day where all his dog friends (and their people) were out on walkies, and the noon walk neared an hour by the time news of the day had been shared.
Seditionism and Othering seem to be able to levitate on all but one leg, despite the complete lack of attending to, I dunno, some code like Rotary International’s Four-Way Test, or the Boy Scout Law, or Hammurabi’s Code, not to mention the Sermon on the Nount. I suggest that we are caught up in an economic belief system, that rather than any of the above, is more tied to the shallow philosophy of either or both of these extremes: a belief that “It’s Always Been This Way” with some “enemy” ever at the gate against whom we must defend, or of “Inevitability”, in which, once we’re all properly imbued with the “proper vision”, and embrace whichever “-ism” of modernist thinking we prefer (and the other side surrenders their belief), then and only then will we all be content and happy and comfortable. But until then; well, nothing we can do to improve our lot generally. Such as providing that fellow who has no coat with our spare one. As for the valuable experience of making amends for past shortcomings and actions? Pretty unsettling stuff for us Boomers, it seems, at least as obeerved at a recent diocesan discussion on the lot of Native Americans in Iowa.
Not easy, ever, for anyone. But when it is done it is transforming. “Hi” to your golden from my lab/golden!
On the Mount. Sheesh