Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung December 9, 2022.
The second anniversary of the January 6th. Insurrection is not far off.
I have thought about what story or stories will surface to express the reality of that day and those leading up to its execution. As in the past, there will be competing narratives, each advancing the events and their meaning to conform with outcomes that may be self-serving.
For several reasons I was drawn to an article in the December issue of The Atlantic entitled “How Germany Remembers the Holocaust and What America can Learn About Atonement,” written by Clint Smith.
As a mythologist I am interested in stories as carriers of values, aspirations, and ideals as well as the shadow side of both personal and collective myths. I also share with many an interest in what motivates some versions of stories to be cultivated and shared and which rise up through the energies of specific interests—political, spiritual, practical, fictional—and by whom?
Stories are vehicles that have as their core a belief or set of beliefs which we choose to adopt or reject in our personal or national life. Their power resides in their ability to shape our thinking as well as behaviors that emanate from them. Stories are like the infrastructure that supports and maintains our identity. Who we allow, tolerate, or assign authority to in telling our story is a monumental decision because it shapes our destiny as a people. Today we find ourselves in the tall grass of competing narratives.
We might pay close attention to what kinds of stories are being suppressed today, what is allowed to be taught, what books should be banned, what ideas should be exiled, what values should be marginalized. For stories, more than any other form of expression, are the oldest carriers of our identity of who we are committed to.
These narratives grow directly from how we choose to remember our history and what we lean towards surgically removing, including our founding narrative as a Democracy, our shared origin myth.
Unfortunately, there are those in power positions who are making decisions with wide consequences. We must be cautious and vigilant about those who step forward to proclaim:
The following book titles should be banned from libraries and schools.
Topics on sexuality, race and gender should be prohibited to “protect our children.” For some age groups this is a good decision.
Certain truths about our own history of genocide would best be kept under wraps, their identity simply denied.
Real respectful conversations about our differences should be avoided, deploying instead a series of “d” words: deny, deflect, deceive, deflate, demean, destroy.
Such a “method” for silencing alternative views puts in direct jeopardy the most fragile, and seventh “d” word: Democracy.
Much has been written about America’s pseudo-innocence, which in its expression has taken up a less-than-nuanced stance towards history, especially our own. Pseudo-innocence prefers to keep the same historical accounts, the stories we wish to remember, frozen, atrophied so that our nation’s shadows remain hidden in the basement of our consciousness.
Remembering seems unwise. Yet it seems that remembering has its own propriety, its own moral or amoral code feeding it. So how we refuse to remember is worthy of our study, and along with it, what fiction we drive into the hard ground of history, will further form, or deform our fragile yet coherent myth.
Clint Smith’s illuminating article reveals how Germany today continues to create new rituals to remember the Holocaust; he notes that the movement to remember anew emerged not from government authorities who have their own myth to promote, but “from ordinary people outside the government who pushed the country to be honest about its past.” He also delineates places in our country that have begun such efforts of honest reclamation of our story through memorials.
His final words will be mine: “It is the very act of attempting to remember that becomes the most powerful memorial of all.”