Mind and Change

Americans must have the opportunity to take responsibility for their own future.
- Barack Obama


I am a citizen of America and not a citizen of the world.
- Newt Gingrich

Tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.
- African Proverb




Moving forward is intimidating because, for the best results, it requires not looking back. There is a divide in thinking right now in America, it seems, in the way that people think about memory. Memory embeds itself in the past, as a watcher's mind aspires to the nostalgic, in hopes that the "good ol' days" of the past will return, and bring with them the picturesqueness of simpler times. Memory also embeds itself in the future, perhaps best illuminated by Twain's quote that, "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." This mode prepares itself for what is to come by recalling the stories of the past. There is also the mode which is the locked in the "here and now," potentially holy in terms of perception (Ram Dass', BE HERE NOW) but also a potentially dangerous pitfall into indifference (escaping the collective memory altogether; more on this at another time). When action on the collective level is proposed, these modes of memory intensify and become increasingly distinct from one another. Political actions in times of unrest and uncertainty usually bring a rhetorical intensity that is cut and dried: we either do it, or we don't. With two active and different modes of memory, different ways of thinking about time, confront one another, what we get is a trauma in which both modes must confront the past. French historian Pierre Nora defines "memory" as, "exemplified in but also retained as the secret of so-called primitive or archaic societies..." and history as, "how our hopelessly forgetful modern societies, propelled by change, organize the past" (1). Recollection and organization are implemented for building what is to come, that which is "propelled by change."






Change. It is what we wanted when we elected Obama. To back out on taking the action necessary for change is nothing less than dooming our ability to operate as a free thinking and free acting society; it would be our collective declaration of change, made official, and then our collective sloth and de-legitimization. To get in the way of Health Care Reform is to get in the way of our own social mobility, as it would prove that America is locked into a perpetual present in which it will inevitably freeze and slip away. This is a perpetual present that has given us our economic problems, as it is one that fails to postpone gratification, and is addicted to instant pleasure and sedation. The problem of Health Care is thus no different from the problem of American gluttony. If this country is going to survive, then it must use it's history in order to orient it's memory in such a way as to re-invent itself. Like a human anatomical system, the United States is in a place where it's body is regenerating itself. Old pieces, like clay, are falling off rapidly and the undergrowth -- that which is at this very moment sprouting out of American collective consciousness and memory -- is cracking the surface, pushing forward to manifest a whole new country.

The idea that we are in the process of building a whole new country is the crisis that modes of memory are now undergoing. It is one that the "good ol' days of the past" mode wishes to pull in the reigns of globalization with so that jobs may be brought back to the homeland, and one that identifies as being a citizen only of the United States, and not a citizen of the world (this is captured by Newt Gingrich's in his recent speech to the GOP). The "looking to the future" mode would like to see this process extend itself through the metamorphosis of technology and human communication, so that the lessons of the past might offer tools for shaping the future of a country emerging as something different from what it started as.




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SOURCE: (1) Nora, Pierre. "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire." trans. Marc Roudebush, in Representations, No. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring 1989), pp. 7-12.