There have been academic studies which explain “how quickly we forget” due to “recency bias” which pushes newer information to the front of our consciousness and relegates previous events to the back. It’s a natural process for humans with limited storage in their mental hard drive.
Also, if a shocking new event resembles a previous one, the importance of today’s is minimized since we’ve seen this movie before. Essentially, we get used to it; we become calloused, hardened, desensitized.
But I believe that certain events should be burned into our permanent memories, intentionally or naturally, never to be forgotten. For me, they are events that rip the pretense away from society’s good intentions. They prove that, for the short term, Stephen Miller is right when he says our world is governed by the “iron laws” of strength, force and power.
I have been stunned by the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, along with more than 20 others in ICE custody in recent months. I worry that one of MAGA’s greatest triumphs has been to mute our reactions to them because they have are no longer sensational or rare. Instead, I hope they rank high on the list of painful but unforgettable moments in our recent history.
I’ll never forget the assassinations of our best and brightest, JFK, MLK Jr., and RFK. What seemed a promising future with unlimited potential became a bloody dead end.
I’ll never forget the moment when I learned that protesters at Kent State in Ohio had been shot by untrained National Guardsmen as they protested the Vietnam War in May, 1970. It seemed a line had been crossed, and for many, it had been. The country soon found the war unnecessary and distasteful, even though it took almost three more years and thousands more American and Vietnamese lives to remedy the mistake.
I’ll never forget the day the U.S. military invaded Iraq without direct provocation, on the (faulty) evidence that they possessed “weapons of mass destruction.” It felt the same as the day Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, and I heard a young mother there interviewed who said their only choice was “to fight or die.”
I’ll never forget January 6, 2021 when a maddened crowd set upon Congress as they attempted to complete their sworn duties. Ashli Babbitt, and multiple police officers paid with their lives because our demented president told the crowd to “fight like hell.”
I hope we don’t forget the votes of Congress on Nov. 17 and 19, 2025, when Congress voted to release the Epstein files, patting themselves on the back for their support for transparency, and setting a hard deadline of 30 days for their release. I’m unsure if they’ve forgotten those votes, mixed into the maelstrom of a “war” in Venezuela, an attempt to extort complete control of Greenland from Denmark and NATO, and now a well-planned attempt to stir enough unrest in Minneapolis to declare martial law, which would hand all power to the federal government, and leave our Constitution as only a memory.
We are at a crossroads in which our elected officials, and their advisors, have shown themselves unmoved by innocent deaths related to people peacefully exercising their First, Second, and Fourth Amendment rights. In the case of the Vietnam War and the reign of Nixon, it took Republicans to lead the way out of a “long national nightmare,” and it’s the same today. I’m sure many of them are uncomfortable with the tactics used by ICE: arrest quotas for heavily armed, untrained, masked squads who have been told (falsely) that they have absolute immunity from prosecution, and the right to break down doors of citizens’ homes, and detain their children, too. Republicans need to find the courage to “speak out against the madness” instead of trying to hold onto their power in a corrupt regime.
We should never forget the wanton deaths in Minneapolis and elsewhere, and we shouldn’t let Congressional Republicans forget them either. No matter what your politics, you know in your heart that executing protesters out of fear rather than actual threats isn’t right today and never has been in the U.S. We need to remember them until the wrongs have been righted, and the untrained enforcers, along with their superiors at the very top, have been held accountable under our traditional American system of justice. It’s a way to make sure that Miller’s “iron laws” of force can be melted and broken by people united for good.
Allen Woods is a freelance writer, author of the Revolutionary-era historical fiction novel “The Sword and Scabbard,” and Greenfield resident. His column appears regularly on a Saturday. Comments are welcome here or at awoods2846@gmail.com.