remembering America

One of my older essays for Common Dreams, but just as pertinent now.

The Memory Project
by Linda O'Brien

More and more Americans are becoming aware there is something very wrong with this administration, and it is frightening them. But there is an emptiness here now where before there was a common thread like a piece of music. We've lost the thread, and the sound is discordant and jagged with vast silences, imbued with fear, between the notes.

To combat the worst designs of the administration, we are going to have to combat fear itself. If we're to have a chance of surviving, much less winning, we have to somehow let the others know we're there for them, not separate or against.

The nation's soul memory has been lost in a fog of induced amnesia. Neither the amnesia nor the emptiness was caused by the attacks of 9/11. It was what came after, when Bush, instead of saying that we are still us, told a nation still in shock that everything had changed, and then proceeded to make that true. The effect was to confirm the insidious thought that comes naturally after a violent assault: "You are not You any more. You were a lie."

Memory and history both were replaced with new realities, a new "identity." "We are vulnerable, we must strike first, they hate us because we are free." Ignoring those who love us, those who fought with us; erasing our role as a light. "We must seek them out here, too, and we must give up some freedoms. I know Americans are with me." So easily, so smoothly, We became I, and Americans not with him became Americans against him. "We" were all but forgotten, split into Us and Them. The strands that held us together are wearing thin; invisible underpinnings are blurred and torn.

And perhaps we are helping, by making our arguments all about Bush. Obliquely, we are confirming that he is America. The reality is that he is almost negligible in the bigger discussion we must have: They're for, we're against, and who are we together?

Right now, we are regaining our equilibrium. Right now, people have found the confidence and sense of self to protest the Patriot Act and Bush. But if we don't clearly redefine, or define for the first time, who we intend to be, then the next great challenge will build on the lost sense of self as well as a decimated social net, ravaged economy, anger, fear, and lost innocence. For months I've been wondering about Germany. Was it just the nationalistic, militaristic propaganda and the manipulation of fear and shame that wiped out enough of a nation's soul to allow Hitler? Or was it also the lack of a sustained countering movement to keep soul, reawaken soul, stir her memory?

I don't think invoking Nazi Germany is too extreme. As Paul Krugman said in a recent interview by the Guardian, "There's this fundamental unwillingness to acknowledge the radicalism of the threat we're facing."

We've never been clear, really, about who we are, and that is why the emptiness exists now. In fact, if this administration hadn't screwed up so very badly, there wouldn't have been enough dissent to create a recognizable split. The next coup that occurs will be far smarter and subtler. Now is the time to turn eyes away from Bush and back towards each other, to stir memory that We are America, not this leader or any other.

To fight against the masterful manipulation of instinct, the intentional arousal of shadow forces in the national psyche, we have to go deeper than instinct and beyond rage. Go for the meeting place of our differences. Not the "center" promoted by some as our salvation--that place characterized by the absence of deeply-held beliefs--but the opposite, the seam where Americans' most powerful beliefs intersect along common root lines.

It's as if a beloved family member had died, and we have to go home to siblings we've never been able to talk to and somehow talk about the most difficult things. There is no formula. It's a talking that is half a listening, a silence. Recently, William Pitt's "I Believe" and Marc Ash's "What I Want" for Truthout, in particular, have done it.

My dream is for someone to fund a "memory project" national newspaper created by the hundreds of brilliant, mostly unpaid internet writers. But the calls to memory don't need to be in words; they can be in any creative form that is your own. I think of Daniel Barenboim's concert for Palestinians in Ramallah recently. A member of the audience said, "He's reaching out to the Palestinian people with the utmost solidarity in a very creative and human way. He touches the soul."

You don't have to be a virtuoso. But you do have to go to Ramallah.

People are sick of the emptiness. When I caught a cab this past September 11, the driver asked if I minded the Vivaldi that was pouring from the radio. He said, "There is too much death and sorrow in the news, so I listen to the music." We have to go to that no man's land separating our perception of reality in this terrifying state of amnesia from theirs and trust that the music in the truest thing we have to say will be heard. Then play like our very lives depended on it.

Who will help a nation of half-amnesiacs remember? It has to be us, and it has to be now. Because we are able, and because we have not forgotten yet, but we will.