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mackenzian

Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

memory

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Clearing the cache

Boxes of stacked sepia classic photographs, in rows of three. A uniformed white man is in the center image. Above and to his right are women.
Photo credit: Fabien Barral

Every so often, one of my websites starts to show errors and the technicians “clear the cache.” It did that again last week.

Cache files are created by apps to store commonly used information so it doesn’t have to be generated or downloaded again.” —Lowell Heddings

Over time, browsers accrue a lot of that temporary data, text, images, styles, and code. A growing cache is something like the brain’s memories, storing each experience, hardening around habits, building us shortcuts as we navigate through life every day.

It’s important to remember carefully. And in interpersonal relationships, it can also be useful to flush cached memories from time to time.

Fixing others’ in the past can mean missing who they are in this moment.

For convenience, we might fix somebody in time in a period where their handiwork caused negative results for us. Our cache might justify us in feeling resentment, even after we’ve resolved the issue or mitigated its outcomes.

The cache can just as easily contain pleasant memories as unpleasant ones, and we might be even more reluctant to clear our cache of them because they feel good. Yet there’s still a major benefit to shifting from memory to experience, from past to present.

In the present moment is the only place that real relationship happens.

No matter how much a parent looks warmly at an old photo of their adult child, the version of the child that the photo captured is forever gone.

Even if those parents struggle to view their adult child without nostalgia, it’s only as they make room in their perceptions for the children they have today that they stand the chance of relating person-to-person rather than person-to-projection.

And none of us can compete with others’ projections about us.

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You have to manage your own memories

Close-up of hands handling what appear to be old letters. The folder is frayed, possibly water-damaged.
Photo credit: Dương Trần Quốc

The Church State Council pulling down its statement of support for California’s Proposition 8 (2008) is no match for me and the Wayback Machine.

The statement is a piece of evidence in a series of posts I wrote back in 2013 that contains several links to official Adventist departments, ministries, and advocacy organizations. These links provide a trail of the denomination’s work over the last 30 years or so to minimize or outright oppose civil protections for LGBTQ people.

Those links also frequently break, more so than links in any other cluster of articles I host on this site. The only other topic cluster that comes close to this breakage rate includes—wait for it—articles on government surveillance.

I know the internet is a fragile, ethereal house. I know a page can go up today and come down tomorrow, perhaps broken in a site redesign, perhaps gracefully retired by an active site editor.

I have a few retired pages on this site myself: the site structure has changed about three times since 2012. I changed it when I started self-hosting. I changed it again when I redesigned and started my business. I have still never withdrawn a post, so if any of you are ever bored enough to trawl through the archives, you’ll notice all sorts of things back there. (God speed.)

But the official links that break in my articles aren’t just moved or re-posted with new context or fixed in place for posterity’s sake. They’re gone.

Sometimes what information stays up or comes down on a site isn’t benign. Sometimes the way a new administration preserves or reframes old items represents its approach to a topic. In an authoritarian internet, the new erases the old and there’s no basis for challenge.

There’s some cover for this in emerging European law that establishes “the right to be forgotten.” But I think even that right, which makes most sense for individuals without a big public footprint, is slightly different from what perpetually broken links can create: a mandate to forget. If all the links to the tree falling in the forest are broken and those who watched it fall can’t find each other, did it really happen?

Since studying the customs of British intelligence and political communication in graduate school, I’ve held onto a pointed cartoon about official news from cartoonist Tom Toles. It’s titled “The first draft of the rewrite of history,” and the punchline is the motto of spokespersons and governments alike: “Your memory is in error. We regret your mistake.”

I’m learning to manage my own memories. This isn’t a task one can do well as an isolated individual; instead we all need peer networks that are full of people who can help us to remember well even news that’s uncomfortable.

The Wayback Machine and I can take on a single site editor one link at a time. But it would be so much better if we could trust that people with power weren’t going to try to rewrite our common history in front of our eyes.

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Copeland: How solidarity requires memory

M. Shawn Copeland's book, Enfleshing Freedom, is about theologies of embodiment.

I recently shared M. Shawn Copeland’s description of solidarity as a way of relating that has material consequences: it’s not just an ideal, it’s an ethic.

In this passage, Copeland explains how solidarity also relies on our memories of past ways of relating, specifically our memories of trauma and suffering.

Solidarity is an intentional moral and ethical task.

[It] begins in anamnesis—the intentional remembering of the dead, exploited, despised victims of history. This memory cannot be a pietistic or romantic memorial, for always intentional recovery and engagement of the histories of suffering are fraught with ambiguity and paradox. The victims of history are lost, but we are alive. We owe all that we have to our exploitation and enslavement, removal and extermination of despised others… Our recognition and regard for the victims of history and our shouldering responsibility for that history form the moral basis of Christian solidarity.” —M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom

As Miroslav Volf has argued, we can remember in ways that aren’t helpful and that ultimately corrode our relationships with others. “Fake news” and “post-truth” accounts of the past are faulty ways of remembering, for example. In Volf’s view, memorials that end in resentment are also faulty.

Copeland explains that memory has an even more fundamental value: memory of past pain honors our connection with people who have been harmed. Even if we can’t change what has happened, we can honor it by taking alternate action today. “Solidarity,” she writes, ” mandates us to shoulder our responsibility to the past in the here-and-now in memory of the crucified Christ and all the victims of history.” We honor the past by engaging the present deeply.

The book of James suggests that the way we live proves our commitment to our beliefs. In the same way, how much we exercise solidarity as a practiced ethic and not merely as an ideal demonstrates just how connected we think we are to others and their lives. The astronauts’ “overview effect” gives them an instant planetary perspective on life. And with all of humanity’s squabbling over borders, we do need that.

We also need an organic view of life, one that highlights the inescapable interconnection of all things and wakes us up to our mutual impacts on and responsibilities for one another. If I can remember the heat that has burned you as keenly as I remember the heat that’s burned me, I might just be motivated enough to turn off the stove. But until I am so moved, phrases like “Never again” will always be more aspiration than resolve.

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More on the Japanese internment

This week, George Takei shared more about his experience with socially marginalized people and marginalizing social laws.

I referred to his 2014 TED talk in last night’s post; this morning, he published a new reflection on his life in a United States internment camp.

The United States apologized for locking up Japanese Americans. Have we learned nothing?” —George Takei

Read it: “They interned my family. Don’t let them do it to Muslims.” (Washington Post, November 18, 2016)

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Reflections on the US-Japanese Internment

Lately I’ve been honoring the Santayana quotation about being doomed to repetition by referring my readers to history:

Habit and memory are a sort of heredity within the individual… Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained[,] infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” —George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1906

As the next administration’s proxies invoke the prison camps where the United States held 120,000 Japanese-American people for four years during World War II, those who lived through that experience are recounting their memories for our benefit.

Actor George Takei shared his experience with an audience in Kyoto, Japan, two years ago. He recalled the day soldiers walked up his drive to force his family out of their house. “I will never be able to forget that scene,” he said. “It is burned into my memory.” At the time, he was five years old.

These things don’t just happen, however. They creep, and we adjust, and they creep some more.

Prior to the Bosnian genocide starting, the same Islamophobic rhetoric seen in the U.S, was spread throughout the former Yugoslavia. ‘Muslims are terrorists,’ ‘They want to spread Sharia Law.’ ‘They want your women to wear hijabs.’ All of that stuff we’ve ignored… Genocide is a slow process, you know… and it starts with words and instilling fear into the people. We’re past that in the U.S.” —Arnesa Buljusmic-Kustura (November 17, 2016)

“You’re worried about a future that’s already here,” Ayesha Siddiqi also wrote last night. “[It] just didn’t touch you yet.” I joke sometimes about the U.S. government being overfamiliar with my iris patterns—because I was required to submit them with other biometric data more than a decade ago. But it’s really not a joke. It’s more than just bureaucracy.

And that’s why I keep writing about history and why others, like Takei and Buljusmic-Kustura keep recounting the targeting they’ve lived through. We do it with the hope that the more we tell these stories, the more that more of us will be able to perceive the social and legal patterns behind and around us; that we’ll use that perception to help us better notice and intervene in the experiences of others; and that, given opportunity, when the old, old story cracks open at this chapter again, we will choose differently than we have before.

Nothing will change until we do.

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How we remember

CN: 9/11 remembrances and suicide.

Photo of one of the National 9/11 Memorial voids lit for the evening. Victim names are visible.
Photo credit: PWP Landscape Architecture, via the ASLA 2012 Professional Awards

On September 11, 2001, I was at home at my grandparents’ house in Jamaica. I was dressed in scrubs an aunt had handed down, and had no plans to do much for the day but rest: I was out of school for medical recovery while classmates and others began their semester on campus. As I walked through the dinning room table that morning, I watched my 85-year old grandmother stand two feet away from her television. Smoke clouds wrapped around the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

“Oh, Lord, help us!” she said. I didn’t see the second plane. I just heard her as she did.

I don’t know anyone who was around in 2001 who doesn’t have a story like that. And I don’t think anyone needs to tell us to “Never forget” because we can’t forget. Looping video all over domestic and international news broadcasts ensures we can’t forget, even when we wish to, even when we try to opt out.

And even if we missed it the first time round, broadcasters are perfectly happy to show it to us now.

I couldn’t get a phone call through to friends in New York for over a week after 9/11. For people on the ground, who lived there and lost relatives, friends, and coworkers, the experience was exponentially worse. Ordinary life has permanently shifted in some way for all of us.

Miroslav Volf published The End of Memory five years after 9/11. Reflecting on the discourse around what later became New York City’s National 9/11 Memorial, he writes:

We demand immediate memorials as outward symbols because the hold of memory on our inner lives is so tenuous. And then, because we have tangible, observable memorials, we feel absolved of the obligation to remember on our own; we feel free, in good conscience, to immerse ourselves in the blur of the present. Thus does the memory boom try to compensate for an actual memory bust.” —Miroslav Volf

Volf explains that we easily mis-remember, filling in details that are inaccurate, or obscuring details that could change or challenge easier interpretations of events. And he insists throughout the book that the way we remember constitutes us: our memories shape our individual and collective identities.

I may not be culpable if I misremembered unintentionally; but I am responsible to remember correctly. The obligation to remember truthfully is just one dimension of the general obligation to tell the truth.” —Miroslav Volf

This is the question that Tom Junod considers in a remarkable and troubling Esquire essay on photos of “the falling man,” one of perhaps 200 people who jumped from the towers on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. AP photographer Richard Drew was in New York for another assignment, went toward the disaster rather than away from it, and took a series of photos of the World Trade Center buildings from his post next to first responders.

That photo series, and the people it represents, are rarely seen now in remembrances of 9/11. Junod asks why that is.

What distinguishes the pictures of the jumpers from the pictures that have come before is that we—we Americans—are being asked to discriminate on their behalf. What distinguishes them, historically, is that we, as patriotic Americans, have agreed not to look at them. Dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of people died by leaping from a burning building, and we have somehow taken it upon ourselves to deem their deaths unworthy of witness—because we have somehow deemed the act of witness, in this one regard, unworthy of us.” —Tom Junod

Read the rest. The article includes photos from Drew’s series as well as direct discussion of suicide, and may be distressing.