What Keeps Us Up At Night
Julius Dadalti
There are certain things we don’t talk about. The past is one of those. If we talked about the past we would never stop. It would be like a roaring river overflowing the banks. The social fabric is not built to withstand conversations about the past, individually, and as a society. We tend to avoid it.
Very early on we are conditioned against this topic. Mothers never say “remember those brutal early days when you could not contain the waste products inside of your body and it was up to your Mom and Dad to provide basic hygiene?” They very rarely go there with their offspring, for good reason.
Or in another example — the school teacher rarely hearkens back to the early days of the school year to remind their students of how ignorant they used to be. Maybe false humility, or maybe we have an example of an awkward truth — there has not been such progress. But in either case, it is better to leave the past unsaid and unremembered.
Similarly, as a society we tend to skip past the past as an explanation for what ails us. I’m thinking now of successive Republican administrations here in New Hampshire who have quietly and in yeomanlike fashion axed our tax revenues by dispensing with such things as business taxes and interest taxes on the wealthy. There is now a hue and a cry as services for the poor such as health care and public education are being squeezed out of existence. But in all the squawking there is a reticence to call on past examples of largesse for the rich. It just goes against our conditioning.
It’s an American thing, I guess, the idea that we should not be hampered by what has gone before. Focus on the blue skies and don’t worry. Be happy.
The habit gets under my skin.
It is so easily abused by the abusive elements in our midst, who would have people scrabbling for table scraps or undergoing years of therapy to ferret out their trauma and melancholiness. When they could just bring up the past in occasional conversations. But they can’t because they don’t and never shall.
The famous quote “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” attributed to I forget who, is proof that we do not really forget the past, we just don’t like to talk about it much. It’s not the same thing at all.
Initially a mark of pride, I think the reticence about the past is a mark of shame, the recognition that the past has repeated itself over and over again. These cycles of repetition are unavoidable, and it’s not because we forget. We can’t forget. Quite the contrary, the memories haunt us in our dreams and our absent-minded moments, when we are no longer on guard against our collective memories. We’d just rather not talk about them.
A society that is committed to collective amnesia is not a sustainable enterprise. We need to discuss the past openly and without shame. As family and as a people.
Please discuss among yourselves.
