January 6th and Disremembering

Today marks the anniversary of the January 6^th insurrection. Some Americans will remember the violence of the day in the attempt to overturn an election. They will commemorate the fallen officers who defended the Capitol. They will recall the events as a dark moment in U.S. history and remind us that we should be forever vigilant about the state of our democracy.

Others will celebrate the patriots who tried to defend democracy. For them, January 6^th does not represent an insurrection. Instead, on that day true Americans dared to exercise their right to contest the theft of an election. They will stand proudly, probably listening to the national anthem sung by those very patriots who, they believe, have been unjustly imprisoned. They will feel vindicated and emboldened, because on January 20th, ten days after his sentencing for 34 felony convictions, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 47^th president of the United States.

Two Americas. Two memories.

One cannot help but note the stark contrast. As if millions of people in this country live in completely different worlds, with different facts and opinions, although they may be next door neighbors or members of the same family. They may share a life together, except for a politics that wounds and scars, a politics that colors the eye and attunes the ear to only certain words and deeds. All else fades to black.

But it is in the intimate spaces, and we must remember this in a time that has cracked like soil desperate for water, where care, love, and desire bump up against crass political positions. Here memories collide and, sometimes, fade away.

Today, four years after the assault on the Capitol, I am not thinking about those who hold on to their political positions with a white-knuckled grip or with those who religiously watch MSNBC or FOX news. My concern, or fear, isn’t with competing memories, but with those who choose to disremember – with Americans who have tired of the vitriol of our politics, who clamor for a sense of calm and normalcy, who just want some semblance of peace.

These people will mute their outrage over January 6^th. They will note it with a soft sigh of resignation, because no matter what happened then, no matter the consequences that followed from the day when the Confederate battle flag found its way to the Capitol, Donald Trump will soon be the president, again. And they, the ones who clamor for peace, probably voted for him.

One America. Disremembering.

When we disremember an egregious moment in the past, we shape how we live in the present. I take the word from Toni Morrison. In her novel, Beloved, she grapples with the difficulty of haunting memories that consume. Disremembering enables the characters in the novel to ward off, at least temporarily, the pain of the past. It allows them to blot out horrible loss. But disremembering also distorts who the characters take themselves to be. Something is lost. It is this sense of the word that strikes me as particularly relevant for today. Disremembering is active forgetting.

Some Americans will disremember January 6^th. They will downplay its significance. Turn a blind eye to what Donald Trump said and what he did. Felon or not, he is, or will be, the president of the United States. That active forgetting helps them to put aside a version of the past that gets in the way of moving forward or casting the problem aside so that we, they, can get about their lives. No matter the costs.

I am not talking about the extremes in our politics. I am talking about that vaunted and cherished middle – those who are all too willing to forget so that they can return to loving and caring for their people who may remember differently and who, perhaps, believe that this country must forever belong to them. These Americans desire peace and reconciliation. Neither bodes well for the rest of us. It never has.

In the 1870s, as Americans turned their backs on the promise of Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass complained that the American people were “destitute of political memory.” He urged the nation not to forget the meaning of the Civil War. His was a desperate plea as the violence swelled throughout the south and the Black bodies piled up. Douglass asked on July 5, 1875, “If war among whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks, what will peace among whites bring?” This peace, he insisted, was blood drenched, and it required an active forgetting.

Those acts of disremembering heralded horrors with signs that eventually read FOR WHITE PEOPLE ONLY.

Today there will be two different recollections of what happened on January 6^th. Underneath both, or between them, will be a kind of disremembering that has made the Trump presidency possible, again.

Active forgetting rests at the heart of our troubles. Let’s pray, although our history screams otherwise, that horrors do not follow in its wake.