ON MEMORIAL Day, we remember how easy it is to forget. Today’s observance began as the honoring of war dead, then became a larger calling to mind of lost loved ones. On Decoration Day, the holiday’s old name, graves are marked with flags — but also with flowers.
A holiday devoted to such recall, though, raises the question of what memory does. It is not, despite George Orwell’s claim, a mere hole down which the past falls. Instead, memory is inventive, creative, and alive — an ongoing activity through which we turn experience into understanding. When we remember a bygone event, for example, we recall not the event in itself, but the way it appeared the last time we remembered it. That is what makes memory dynamic (and, defense attorneys would argue, unreliable). A person’s memory is essential to individual identity, and the loss of one entails the loss of the other, as families of Alzheimer’s sufferers know too well.
Collective memory does something similar, transforming a disparate throng into a group. For the nation, holidays are one instrument of such common identity. But national amnesia can be as devastating for the country as the blanked-out mind is for individuals.
It is said that America is uniquely defined more by the future than the past. Perhaps believing that, Americans have often made mistakes in memory, with dread consequences. To have had the Vietnam War required forgetting Korea. To have had the first Gulf War required forgetting Vietnam. To have the present war in Iraq required forgetting — well, a host of wartime lessons. And to maintain its Cold War nuclear arsenal, America needs to forget Allied terror bombing in 1945, culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2011/05/30/together_we_remember__and_forget/
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