I was reading a piece in the NY Times just now about Chile and the aftermath of the military coup which toppled Salvator Allende.
There is a small group of Chileans who are reminding their nation of the scars that are left. The majority of Chileans have found it much easier to simply forget.
"As it prepares to mark the coup's 30th anniversary, Chile likes to think of itself as a normal, even boring country ? prosperous and calm, more concerned with mundane issues like the fishing law and the marriage code than plans to transform society. It has achieved that condition, though, only by ignoring ? or by failing to heal ? the most painful wounds left by its past, in what a resentful minority describes as a calculated act of "collective forgetting."
"What few here or abroad wish to acknowledge, however, is that Chileans did not, at first, freely choose the economic model under which they now live. Instead, it was imposed on them as the result of the coup. Underlying the current prosperity, in other words, is a long trail of blood and suffering that makes the thought of reversing course too difficult to contemplate."
Are we as a nation approaching the same outcome? Has the thought of changing course or saying we made mistakes in Iraq become so difficult to contemplate that seventy percent of us would continue to support it rather than admit the errors? Are we suffering a "collective forgetting"?
Chile's forgetting spans thirty years. Americans, true to form, have made forgetting much more efficient. We forget from day to day, speech to speech. We make up excuses to fit the changes we're told on the fly. We collectively forget daily.
That is, somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy percent of us do. I wonder how long will that last? Will it last until we completely believe the daily versions of events and commit a conscious act of collective forgetting which permanently erases the truth of what brought us to this point?
There are some Americans, as there are some Chileans, who will never agree to forget, although it is much easier to just give in and cooperate in the deception, some of us just can't bear to live the lie.
I hope more Americans wake up and realize what is happening to us as a nation before it's too late and their forgetting allows the lies to become their truth.
There is a small group of Chileans who are reminding their nation of the scars that are left. The majority of Chileans have found it much easier to simply forget.
"As it prepares to mark the coup's 30th anniversary, Chile likes to think of itself as a normal, even boring country ? prosperous and calm, more concerned with mundane issues like the fishing law and the marriage code than plans to transform society. It has achieved that condition, though, only by ignoring ? or by failing to heal ? the most painful wounds left by its past, in what a resentful minority describes as a calculated act of "collective forgetting."
"What few here or abroad wish to acknowledge, however, is that Chileans did not, at first, freely choose the economic model under which they now live. Instead, it was imposed on them as the result of the coup. Underlying the current prosperity, in other words, is a long trail of blood and suffering that makes the thought of reversing course too difficult to contemplate."
Are we as a nation approaching the same outcome? Has the thought of changing course or saying we made mistakes in Iraq become so difficult to contemplate that seventy percent of us would continue to support it rather than admit the errors? Are we suffering a "collective forgetting"?
Chile's forgetting spans thirty years. Americans, true to form, have made forgetting much more efficient. We forget from day to day, speech to speech. We make up excuses to fit the changes we're told on the fly. We collectively forget daily.
That is, somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy percent of us do. I wonder how long will that last? Will it last until we completely believe the daily versions of events and commit a conscious act of collective forgetting which permanently erases the truth of what brought us to this point?
There are some Americans, as there are some Chileans, who will never agree to forget, although it is much easier to just give in and cooperate in the deception, some of us just can't bear to live the lie.
I hope more Americans wake up and realize what is happening to us as a nation before it's too late and their forgetting allows the lies to become their truth.