Thoughts on memory. Personal and collective.
why burn books when people just forget them
I just read this piece by Lolo on Vanishing Points and I had big feelings and a few thoughts about it.
One thing I and probably many others have struggled with as the scales have tipped further and further right, as our shared reality fractures deeper and deeper, to where we no longer seem to be speaking the same language as our neighbours, our families, our friends; is how can people not see what is happening right before their very eyes?
Do they not remember how terrible Trump's first term was? Do they not remember what they were taught in history class? What our grandparents' generation told us about fascism? Can they not see the humanity being chewed up and spit out by the hateful rhetoric and this growing thirst to see pain and suffering dealt out to a manufactured enemy?
When I hear the audio of the child screaming for their parents while ICE raid a school graduation, I think surely people will open their eyes now. Meanwhile, those fully in the thrall of MAGA ideology easily dismiss it as either conveniently untrue, a lie told by the 'left wing lunatics', or that the child is a necessary casualty in their crusade to rid their nation of the "other". I can't decide which of those is worse, but I suppose it ultimately doesn't matter if the result is the same. We are not seeing the same events through the same lens anymore.
I don't know how we find our way back to a shared reality. A collective truth.
It's the concept of remembering that Lolo talks about in The Violence of Absence that hit me so hard. In large part because I find myself struggling with my own memory and attention. I think the pandemic played a large role in this, we all lost a lot structure and routine and the traditional markers of time that kept us all together. Social media is an obvious factor. The sheer volume of content, the speed at which it is fed to us. It's never ending and all consuming. It makes it easy to miss things, or to forget them altogether.
You can see this bombardment of our weakened attention spans in how Trump's administration has ruled by decree (executive order). From day one it was shock and awe with the endless wave of terrible policy being forced through. We all found ourselves saying, "was that only last week?" It left us feeling paralysed and uncertain about what to do. Simultaneously, a 24hr news cycle could feel like a month had passed, while a week would disappear in the blink of an eye. We couldn't remember what we were meant to think, do, or prioritise from one day to the next.
I've decided I need to work very hard to reclaim my attention. To remember how to be present again. I don't want to lose myself to the paralysis and helplessness that is found in distraction.
The closing paragraphs of Lolo's piece were what struck me the most:
"The Memory Police is about absence by force. Disordered Attention is about absence by noise. But the effect is the same: a citizenry unable to hold on to meaning. A body politic stripped of memory, scattered by distraction. Fascism thrives under these conditions.
Fascism doesn’t need everyone to believe, it only needs most of them to forget. To forget what came before, to forget what freedom feels like, to forget that things could be another way. It thrives in the vacuum left by memory and the confusion sown by fractured attention.
Presence is dangerous to it. Why? Presence is noticing. Presence is refusing to look away."
"Much has been said about the banality of evil: the bureaucratic compliance that enables atrocity. But perhaps the more urgent concept today is the banality of forgetting. The quiet erasure of collective memory through curriculum changes, algorithms, and the hollowing out of time.
Presence is not passive; it is a prerequisite of resistance. And it is one thing that cannot be taken unless we give it away."
janainaart
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