Never Forget?

Today is 9/11.

Later today, the entire town will gather at a park for our annual 9/11 commemoration.  We will remember one of our fellows - a firefighter named Paul Tegtmeier, who died while saving others. 

Everywhere, I see signs and bumper stickers with the Twin Towers and the words: “Never Forget.” Such heroism is worth remembering.  Such tragedy is also worth remembering. 

But what do people mean by never forgetting?  And what do we deem worthy of remembering - or forgetting?

The reason I ask this is because in the last few months, we have seen a lot folks around the country say things like, “Let it go, already.  It’s in the past.”  They weren’t talking about 9/11 - in fact, these are the same folks who have those “Never Forget” car stickers.

What they wanted us to forget was not something done TO us by something done BY us.  In this case, it was slavery and its children - Jim Crow, Segregation, and the Industrial Prison Complex with its mass incarceration of people of color.  We saw this in Charlottesville and its aftermath.  Those who want to bring up the legacy of slavery and its evils are told to sit down and shut up because nobody wants to focus on the past.

The same is true with Native Americans.  When they bring up the wrongs done to them (illegal immigrants coming in and taking over their land, the government making treaties and repeatedly breaking them, mass slaughter of unarmed women and children, abduction of children…), we yawn or tell them to shut up and go back to the reservation.

When people in Hawaii bring up the invasion of their sovereign country by the Marines to benefit a private corporation, we tell them to get over it.

But really, if we should not forget 9/11, why should we forget any of those things?

The reason is obvious.  If it’s done to us, it’s worth remembering - we are the aggrieved party, we’re the victims.  But if it’s something WE do, then it’s, “Nothing to see here.  Move along.”

I noticed this in my work with our diocese’s Reparations Committee, tasked with taking a deep, serious look at New York’s role in slavery.  Most people I speak with had no idea that New York even had slaves, let alone that we treated them shamelessly, and that this state’s connection with slavery went right up to the outbreak of the Civil War.  

We buried that past.  Deep.  The kidnappings, the whippings, the lynchings, the burnings at the stake, the ripping children from parents for a profit.  

On the spiritual level, we know that right relationship with God requires examination of one’s life.  It requires repentance when we have done wrong - and it requires reparation.  But if we forget, if we think we are forever innocent, we deceive ourselves and say, “It had nothing to do with us.”

Only, because the world is woven together by the fabric of the past, because the future proceeds from what has happened before, you can not move toward right relationship without reckoning with the past.  It is our inheritance, good and bad.  And when we see that the evil our forebears did still has an impact today, then it is our obligation to correct it.  Forgetting will not make it go away.

We always want to remember when we are violated.  It helps us justify whatever we do in response.  And some of those things need to be remembered.

But so do the things we want to forget.