5/31/21

By Josh Rubin

It is said from time to time that history is written by those who hold power. It is only a small step further to infer that the manipulation of our social memory serves the purposes of the powerful. That the story that is chiseled into posterity supports a social order. And it follows that the stories of those without the podia of power are rarely told. They can be seen by those who watch closely, but all too quickly are obscured by the steady flow of time, the greatest wave barely a ripple, mostly gone once the eyes that witnessed them close for the last time. The story then goes untold, and we are left to wonder whether those lives and loves and struggles ever happened. Whether most of us ever existed at all.

Memorial Day is charged with the duty of reinforcing the historical bias toward the powerful. I confess that one of the satisfactions I feel derives from my confidence that the permanence of the monuments of the powerful is oversold, and that all will be swept away. Perhaps not as fast as those traces of the life and times of the poor, but nonetheless just as surely and as completely.

And if only brief moments are given us, we are entitled to hold them just as precious. We witness the most poignant of moments. We tell each other what we have seen. If these fragments of truth do not last, if they persist as only eddies in the river, can we, the people, not revive them for each other on this day and during our brief stint of consciousness?