Should we be able to change history, forget the past, wipe it from our memories?
“Anyone feel like spitting on beggars and beating [N-word] children today in Helsinki?”
“[N-words] selling pirated Vuittons”
“If they gave me a gun, there’d be bodies on a commuter train, you’ll see.”
These things were written (and more similar) on a far-right blog about 15 years ago - by the current Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, in Finland. She originally stood by her past speech last week, but has since come out and apologized for them, in the hope that it will be enough to keep her job. Two weeks ago, another new minister from her party (it is a coalition government made up of several parties) lost his job last week (after 11 days in office) for attending and speaking at extremist Nazi rallies a few years ago.
Doing well Finnish politics...
So, my question remains, should we be able to just forget an inconvenient past?
What does your intuition say? Should the light be shone or should it all be swept away, because it isn't convenient. Should we all be able to "forget our past", or should we be held accountable for our past actions - especially if we were adults at the time, as this person was when she wrote this?
I think that there should be a way to redeem ourselves, to earn forgiveness for past transgressions, otherwise no one will ever pass muster for anything, but forgetting the past, I am not so sure about. I don't think that we should have our memories wiped, even if it makes it easier to deal with current conditions.
Forgive, but not forget.
But...
This brings up an interesting topic.
A friend of mine was back home recently and talking with his cousin. They played together all the time as kids, getting up to all kinds of mischief like boys do. The cousin transitioned into a woman a few years ago and the common position is that you aren't allowed to "deadname" a person.
Deadnaming is the act of referring to a transgender or non-binary person by a name they used prior to transitioning, such as their birth name.
The problem is, if my friend is talking about his childhood, the expectation is that he is meant to rewrite history and substitute the current name in for this person instead of what it was. So, if for example he was writing his memoirs of childhood and talking about his best friend growing up, he would have to deny his own memories and write something false. That seems like a very slippery slope to me.
Could a man who raped someone and then transitioned into woman, be safe from prosecution, as it couldn't possibly be her, because she was never that man? Would a Nazi on trial at the Hague be able to say that they are no longer the same person they were then, and as such, were never that Nazi at all? Or a murderer who once they have served their sentence, is no longer and was never a criminal at all.
You cheated on me yesterday!
"It wasn't me. I am no longer the person I was yesterday."
Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?
If our past can't just be rewritten to fit our current narrative, then the past becomes meaningless, and no lessons can be learned from it. There is no continuity and no progression, because progress all becomes haphazard, with no line of steps that lead from one point to the next. It all gets washed away, like footprints on the sand.
What right do people have to enforce a change upon our own memories, or restrict how we speak about the past? What right does culture have to tell me how I remember my childhood, or I have to change the memories of yours?
Yet, this is where we are doing in culture now.
We can't pick and choose the facts of the past, changing the ones that are inconvenient, make us look bad, or no longer represent who we are today. This isn't to say that we can't move on from the past either, and get acknowledged for the changes we have made, because it is important to be able to grow from who we were, into who we will become. But in order to do so, we also have to recognize that regardless of who we are today, we were made through our experiences of the past and to deny they existed, is to deny that we existed at that time.
A person who transitioned into a woman as an adult, does not know what the experience of what it is like to be a little girl, because they were never one, even if they felt like one inside. They might have the experience of how it feels to live with that feeling, or how it felt to hide it away like the myriad gay men who lived their entire lives as straight men, but they can never have been that little girl, no matter how they rewrite history. And to believe they can be, is to diminish the experience of all the little girls who actually lived it, because it becomes a caricature of the experience, like a white person imagining what it is like to grow up black, assuming they have full understanding.
When you started reading this post, you might not have realized where it was going, but I hope that it provokes some thought in the way people view their identity. We are all fluid because we are always changing who we are, all of the time. All of us have experiences as children that were not ideal, all of us feel that we have suffered in some way, at some point in time. Rewriting history doesn't change that suffering we experienced, it just makes it more meaningless, because we are unable to learn from it. Silencing people doesn't change their prejudices, it just pushes them into the shadows to fester.
If we want to learn from the past, we have to be honest with ourselves and others, not rewrite it. We also have to take responsibility for what we have said and done in the past, but it doesn't mean we have to be punished for it under the cultural rules of the present. We shouldn't be blindly editing books and movies to remove the bits that are no longer acceptable, we should be using them as examples and for discussions, as to why they are no longer acceptable.
Just like us as people, what is "acceptable" is always in flux too, and if we are constantly reediting the past to fit in with our current thoughts, we are not going to be working on the present to make the future any better. But, because we focus on all of this identity nonsense, it just keeps fracturing and dividing culture into eight billion splinters that cannot get along well enough, to make the world a better place.
While everyone fights for their individual space, the fabric of a community never gets woven.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
