You’ve heard the calls to #NeverForget. Tragedy and trauma bring out sudden calls for solidarity and collective memory. As if time whisks away such frightening moments like a vapor. A morning mist dried by the first direct rays of sun.

That this is in direct contrast to our society’s instruction in the midst of personal tragedy is telling. Eagerly telling one another to just “get over it.” But not these moments. Not public attacks intended to strike terror. “Remain terrorized” we might say.

We don’t of course. That’s a horrible thought. Banish that. We don’t really say that to each other. What we actually do say is more innocuous.

Never Forget.

Like we could. We mark every year with a new memorial, a continued script of honor and respect for the dead.

Never Forget in a culture of Get Over It and Don’t Worry About It.

The trouble with such remembering and scripted responses of respect is not the remembering. It is the nagging question that we might not know what it is we’re being asked to remember.

Remembered events with unexamined hearts are dangerous.

They are dangerous because we are placing the memory in the wrong position. We are, at once, making memory a priority. And we are stripping it of context and the need to discern what these tragedies are really about.

Here’s a personal example. As my son was learning to write his name, he wrote his letters as they felt comfortable to him. As his teachers taught him in preschool. He worked so hard at writing his name and he got so good at it.

The trouble is that he didn’t write his A in the standard way. They taught another version.

Remembering, only remembering, is like my son writing an A the way he was first taught.

He struggled to relearn it. We had to practice it over and over. And when his hands got to the small a, they would go on autopilot and do it the way they remembered. Not the way his brain wanted them to do it. And he would get so frustrated.

Remembering isn’t everything. When we didn’t learn what was necessary from the event, then what exactly are we never forgetting? What are we doing today to relearn, to discern what is most important for the future?

If it’s bigotry and xenophobia that I’m never forgetting, then no thank you.

Or if it’s militarism and ignorant unity that I’m honoring, then there can be no honor.

The question isn’t “will we forget?” but “what are we refusing to learn?”

Imagine #NeverForgetTheCrucifixion

It seems innocent enough. Never forget that Jesus died on a cross. Just never ask what got him killed. Refuse to find out what he was about or what he was up to. Take pride in not listening to the Pharisees and their concerns about the Messiah.

Don’t read the Sermon on the Mount. Ignore the parables about the problems in the world and keep at them for 2000 years. Pretend that persecutions under Nero are the same as a red Starbucks cup or not hearing “Merry Christmas” in a Kroger.

And certainly obsess about the Crucifixion without dwelling at all about the Resurrection. And that Pentecost! Bah! That junk’s got nothing to do with anything. It’s all about the cross, Baby! #NeverForgetTheCrucifixion forever!

All Holocaust All The Time

What is there to remember about World War II but the Holocaust, anyway? I mean, srsly. That is some messed up stuff. A dude wants to kill off a whole race? He’s all whites are the master race, so what’s a few cracked skulls to supremacy?

Better to ignore the rise of nationalism. And the humiliation after the Great War which led to Hitler. Pretend that the people lined up to support the strong man. And how easy it was to predict fascism if we were willing to actually see what was really happening. How it wasn’t just Germany and Italy, but England and France and upside down geopolitics.

Then we can also pretend the Manhattan Project was inevitable and dropping nuclear weapons on Japan was necessary. Because: Hitler and the Holocaust. Besides, that’s something else entirely. It doesn’t count. We can’t forget the horror! Never. Let’s go back to talking about the Holocaust.

Wait, was there even a first World War?

We pretend as if we take seriously the modern prophetic claim that history is on repeat for those who don’t learn from it. Since not learning from our past is actually our intention, then doom it is.

World War I, The Great War was the bloodiest, most pointless war the world has ever known. It eviscerated a whole generation from France, England, and Germany. And it began over an assassination and geopolitical alliances.

It sucked up the better part of 5 years and was so horrendous that England and France demanded a pound of flesh from Germany and they got 2. What began as pointless ended with stupidity.

And how have we chosen to #NeverForget the most important war in modern history? The war which demonstrates the complexity of national security, nation states and alliances, and geopolitics better than anything else? How do we remember it? We literally forget it by taking the national holiday which calls us to remember it and celebrate its end and changing it to Veteran’s Day.

Never forget? My ass!

Don’t just remember, respect the history.

If we want unity in the face of adversity, we need to show more respect for what we’re remembering. That these are complex moments. With differing memories. We’ve learned different things from the same moments.

There were so many mixed emotions on 9/11. So much confusion. And biggest among them was looking for answers.

Who did this? Why did they do this?

But we abandoned those questions and the need to understand them as soon as we found our scapegoats. No point in learning about that past, we’ve got a war to start.

One of the things I will never forget is how over a million Americans spoke out for peace. In public rallies and on street corners demonstrating against the Iraq invasion.

And yet the press continues to say to this day Nobody was against the war. And everyone was fooled by the Bush Administration.

So the remembering goes. That elusive, quicksilver public narrative told to us in halcyon gauzy Instagram-like filters evoking old film, the days of my youth. Nostalgia trips and those images of planes exploding into the Towers. Modern photography somehow tintyped in the remembering. The hazy memory of unity and the slow drumbeat to war, to retaliation.

What are we never forgetting?

Because even at the time we refused to examine the reason for the attacks.

We refused to listen to the public statements by bin Laden himself. Or heed the warnings that he was determined to make another symbolic attack.

And we forget to see the messages in the attack. In the buildings he chose. The towers symbolized economic power, yes, but the destructive force of globalization and neoliberalism. They were a symbol of global trade which indebted whole countries to Western businesses.

We choose to ignore the consequences of our economic aggression and political impudence.

And we ignored the public statement that there may be a message in the site of the attack and the day they chose. We refuse to acknowledge the humanity of the perpetrators and the thousands killed or tortured in our pursuit of revenge.

Even that our response embodied their criticism of us.

The date they chose is a rich, evocative symbol of American aggression and violence. September 11, 2001 marked the 28th anniversary of the American-backed assassination of Salvador Allende.

Allende, the elected president of Chile was a Marxist, and the first one publicly elected in Latin America. He was bringing new power to the Chilean worker and building a new, stronger economy. He was also locked in political gridlock and paranoia.

On September 11, 1973 the CIA, which had long supported Allende’s opponents, backed a coup which put one of the most evil men in modern history, Augusto Pinochet in charge. His oppressive regime was the definition of “reign of terror.”

Not listening to these critiques and motivations means we don’t actually remember our history. We don’t actually remember what is at stake. And we are intentionally forgetting what these moments are about.

Don’t Just #NeverForget 9/11. Never Forget what made it and what came from it.

Remember the whole thing. And learn the motivations. Otherwise remembering that one day is completely useless to us.

So never forget the attacks. But also never forget why they felt compelled to attack. And what we did in response.

Never forget Afghanistan.

Never forget Iraq.

Never forget Abu Ghraib.

Never forget Gitmo.

Never forget the Geneva Conventions.

Never forget al Qaeda and bin Laden.

Never forget Salvador Allende, the CIA, and Pinochet.

Never forget neoliberalism.

Never forget poverty and geopolitics and how often they are intertwined.

Never forget the failure of nation building.

Never forget destabilizing the Middle East.

Never forget surrendering the moral high ground.

Never forget cluster bombs and depleted uranium munitions.

Never forget that we refused to learn more about that thing we tell each other to never forget.

Never forget that we embodied bin Laden’s caricature of us.

Never forget the tragedy or whitewash our complicity.