5/24/20

By Josh Rubin

Memorial Day brings to us exhortations to exercise our memory, most commonly to remember those who died in wars, more eclectically to refresh our minds with moral hazards of the past in the hopes of avoiding those dangers ever present. There is scolding in the air. Never again is now. And more scolding that takes those scolds to task for finding equivalences among various sectarian tragedies and others. We weigh these sorrows on scales of proprietary outrage, chatter that brings to mind disputations about angels, or perhaps devils in this case, pirouetting on heads of pins.

And then there is the satisfaction we may grant ourselves for being among those who hold in our minds the clearest picture of historic injustices as some sort of prophylaxis, again scolding others for not similarly vaccinating themselves and giving us some herd immunity against moral pitfalls. Perhaps you can tell from my tone, I don’t think any of this works. We can remember the holocaust all we want. It will not cure us. Because focusing on the glaring tragedies of the past will not yield a helpful diagnosis, and remembering them the way we tend to do, in isolation, leads us away from the very virus in our own genetic code that is the true plague.

Inequality in the distribution of the material wherewithal of life is the manifestation of this debility. Excesses of the psychotic behavior that fights to hold onto wealth, and the power to defend the deprivation of others, structures our world. It builds the borders, and the walls along those borders, to protect those of us who “have” from the projected greedy demands of those who by accident of birth are born into poverty. It builds the fences that once surrounded extermination camps and now ring prisons and refugee camps. It fuels the planes of deportation and expulsion.

And it forgives the dehumanization of the other, so that we can look at a suffering child and not feel pain. It justifies the spreading of contagion, in the days of smallpox blankets, and in the age of the Coronavirus.

Remembering history will not work to avoid its repetition, and here is why: it is not history.