When all is said and done, most would probably agree that memory is a good thing. Without it, how would you know who or where you were at any given moment, or who your friends (or perhaps more importantly enemies) are, or decide on what you were going to do today or what to have for breakfast? Life as we know it would probably not be possible, or worse, might’ve never even have happened, or if it had certainly wouldn’t have endured for very long.
Good memories can help us through hard times, warming the cockles of our hearts when we need them warmed the most, though the flip side of this is bad memories that won’t go away, which can unduly undo an otherwise great life. If you don’t believe me, I suggest you check out what there is to know about PTSD, either in the clinical or self-help literature or the rich trove of films and novels about the topic, from the Hunger Games to Slaughterhouse Five (and so many more!). If you happen to “work in the field”, so to speak, you probably already know about Bessel van der Kolk, who has generated an entire cottage industry of books and workshops covering trauma and treating its aftereffects, but as a layperson you might best stick with the likes of Kurt Vonnegut and Judith Guest (some think the movie of her novel Ordinary People is better than the book, but you can decide this for yourself if you have the time).
If you suffer deeply from your own past trauma, my apologies. It is also a given that trauma is a fact of life for everybody, starting with the fact that all life on earth is mortal which means loss, often of the most painful sort, sooner or later. Maybe you’re one of the fortunate ones who’ve healed all your past losses, though some of us might claim that if you believe this you are delusional, a different clinical condition altogether. One can also mourn for anything, of course, the loss of the family fortune or one’s best hopes for the future, and I still mourn the theft of my French track bicycle back around 1980, and will never lose hope it may yet turn up in my life. That was back when almost nobody owned a track bike, and they were hard to find, but much has changed in that regard. I also admit it was a trivial loss compared to so many others, but it was awfully nice and irreplaceable and I still miss it.
At this point we are drifting into the realm of remembrance, which is a somewhat more specific reference than the very general notion of memory. The title of this post is kind of a ripoff of one of the most famous French novels ever, Marcel Proust’s “A la recherché du temps perdu”, which translates into In Search of Lost Time but which most intellectuals and literary types know as Remembrance of Things Past. If you are an actual or wannabe intellectual and literary type, you can impress or confuse your friends with references to this seven volume work, which most people, even those who know about it and refer to it sometimes, have never read, present company included.
One thing all erudite non-readers of Recherche know is that the most famous episode in this mighty tome is the moment where monsieur Proust’s flood of awesome recollections gets triggered when he partakes of a small shell-shaped spongecake known as a madeleine. If you are not French, consider what memories might get triggered by partaking of a s’more or an Oreo or Snickers bar. Marcel’s novel is something like that experience on steroids, or so it appears. You might consider sitting down with a s’more and pen and paper sometime, or a document-writing program all set up on your computer, taking a bite and writing down what comes up. Any comfort food might suffice (poutine?) and who knows? It is possible the world has been waiting for the next “Recherche” to come along, and if Hollywood gets involved you could become rich and famous! Especially if you keep it to one volume.
But what inspired this post is the kind of remembrance that is more formal and institutional, what one might call a Day of Remembrance. We all just experienced one of the best known of these, November 11, best known in these parts as Veterans Day, a day to honor those who served their country and specifically those who were lost in war. The beginnings of Veterans Day back in 1918 are gradually being forgotten by most, but many of us learned in the old days about how it was originally Armistice Day, commemorating the cessation of hostilities in World War One on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
In America we already had a day to remember the war dead, Memorial Day at the end of May, and after WWII Armistice Day became Veterans Day in the US, and was more or less “special” for honoring vets of that most recent epic conflict. At this stage in time it is all a bit confused, but no matter. November 11 is in fact known as Remembrance Day in Canada and other British Commonwealth countries, where many people devote a two minute silence at 11am on 11/11 to think about those who’ve died in wartime. Some well known vets, Kurt Vonnegut among them, have suggested Americans get back to making it Armistice Day and devoting the day to thinking about peace and ways we might achieve it in a world that pays lip service to the concept but otherwise is clearly not all that interested. Armed conflict is a fact of life more than it ever was, or haven’t you noticed?
Honoring war dead in the form of various monuments is a given in the American landscape, from small towns to big cities. Grand memorials to those who died in America’s many wars are all over the National Mall in DC and nearby Pershing Park, with the wall of names of those who died in Vietnam perhaps the most original and some say the most memorable, though the fairly recent Korean memorial might be the eeriest and most startling. From a casual survey done on bike rides, it seems every town common or center in New England has a memorial to those who were lost in the Civil War, which may say something about how many from this region fought and died in that conflict. The memorial to the MA 54th Regiment of Black soldiers who fought for the Union might be the greatest tourist draw on Boston common, a bronze relief more interesting than the usual statue of a cannon or a guy on a horse or holding a gun. A vivid memory of our trip to New Orleans was the spectacle of a giant pillar with Robert E Lee on his horse Traveler, in the middle of a traffic circle. It ain’t there anymore, and its removal was a big deal.
Then there are those times when folks are implored to Remember the Maine or the Alamo, when one assumes those words are on everyone’s lips, if only for a time. We were told to Never Forget after the tragedy on 9/11/01, but is it a sign of changing times when that passionate instruction seems to be now getting an update? The yard sign in the picture is from the most recent election, and it just might be an outlier, unexpectedly turning up in a yard in the Riverdale neighborhood of Dedham MA. Is it irreverent, or timely? We shall see.
Then there are the official “days of remembrance” that are known as Days of Remembrance. If your algorithm works like mine, the one that first comes up in a web search is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which occurs every year on January 27th, which is the day that the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945 This day was officially designated by the UN in 2005, and along with ceremonies at the UN every year, some countries, notably Israel (where it is known as Yom HaShoah), the US, and Austria give it recognition. What happens elsewhere regarding this day is not as clear. In America, PBS in the US ran a documentary by Ken Burns just this year that presented a clear and sobering history of the US role in dealing with Nazi genocide during WWII, which has long been controversial but not well known by most Americans. Let’s just say it was not one of this country’s prouder moments. It is possible more will be aware of IHRD in the coming years, but then perhaps not.
As it turns out, there are a number of official Days of Remembrance, such as the Day of Remembrance for Japanese Victims of Incarceration, held on February 19 every year, the day President Roosevelt gave the order back in 1942 to put Japanese Americans in prison camps. Argentina has its Remembrance Day for Truth and Justice every March 24th, as a consequence of horrific political persecution under Augusto Pinochet. One could easily make a case for many remembrance days in honor of victims of hatred and injustice that have occurred in different locales for different reasons, as the dark side of human history is truly dark, indeed. Genocide, from what happened in Cambodia and Armenia to what Stalin and Mao did to populations of their own people, is part of the human story of which too many are in denial or simply unaware.
All of this comes to mind as it seems this particular week in November has more than its share of official remembrances. There was Veterans Day this past Friday, and as this is written this coming Sunday, 11/20, offers the co-incidence of two official Days of Remembrance, the day of Transgender Remembrance to honor the victims of transphobia, and the International Day of Remembrance for Traffic Victims. It is possible or even likely that you who are reading this are totally unaware of either.
Both are certainly worthy, but due to my own peculiar history and interests, I was unaware of the first but receive many reminders each year about the second. As you might surmise, it is all about a daily tragedy of which most everyone in This Great Country has been aware on some level since they were a kid getting strapped into a car seat. and asking why. Believe it or not, the child’s safety seat is a relatively recent invention, coming along during my lifetime, same as the seat belt. My guess is many younger people assume such things were invented along with the invention of the automobile back in the beginning of time, but the fact is motor vehicle use and safety have always had a fraught relationship, despite government and well meaning people telling us cars are dangerous.
In fact, if government were truly serious about raising awareness of all the ways we’re seriously injuring and killing each other every day since almost forever, we’d all know about the IDRTV, and as a country we’d spend the day listening to personal stories about loss and tragedy because of somebody in a motor vehicle. As it is, the benumbing endless everyday trickle of sad and depressing news stories about crashes and hit-and-runs that I have witnessed my entire life seems to have no effect on most people’s emotions or their driving behavior. In a word, we are all benumbed and it seems we prefer it that way.
As it is, one only hears about the day acknowledging the victims in these stories if one is an interested party in the non-vehicular community. In these parts organizations like MassBike and WalkBoston and Livable Streets make great efforts to encourage those who get the word to light a candle, connect with people who’ve been affected by traffic violence, share on social media, lay a wreath at the local town hall, write a letter to legislators to take action in these matters, etc etc. The MA Vision Zero Coalition (as in striving for zero traffic deaths, a movement that began in Sweden awhile back) will place 2000 yellow flowers on the steps of Boston City Hall Plaza this Sunday, one for each traffic death in the state thus far this year, an event major media will almost certainly ignore. What are they doing in your town? Ours will be attended mostly by those from the VRU community, which stands for Vulnerable Road User, as opposed to those who travel encased in steel. The irony here is that the number of motor vehicle drivers and passengers who are victims greatly outnumbers the pedestrians, and tremendously outnumbers the injured and dead cyclists, though of course just one is too many. No road user is invulnerable at modern traffic speeds.
A key factor in our collective benumbment has been the use of statistics, “38000 dead on our roads this year, 4000 more than last year, oh the infamy! blah blah blah” that groups like the National Safety Council exhort us with every year and to which nobody really pays much mind. But for comparison, MassDOT tells us there have been 106,809 “serious” crashes in the state so far this year (serious meaning resulting in death or severe injury), with pedestrian crashes accounting for 1472 of those and bikers 1144. There have been 375 deaths overall, 34 of them pedestrians and three of them cyclists. I am unaware of any of the motor vehicle organizations, the National Safety Council or American Automobile Association or any departments of transportation saying a thing about the IDTRV. My own cynical take is that economic interests have successfully promoted the lie that on some level folks in motor vehicles are IRVs – Invulnerable Road Users – and you don’t mess useful delusions like that. I am sure the real answer is much more complex and terribly interesting, but few care or want to hear it.
IDTRV has been around since 1993, started by the British group RoadPeace, and was declared a world event by the UN in 2005. What? You’ve never heard of it? It seems like a timely and appropriate idea, given that the last worldwide count of traffic deaths in 2016 came up with 1.35 million people worldwide. It is very important to realize that this does not include many millions more maimed and seriously injured and disabled. As a social worker, I gradually became aware that a common story among the opiate addicted starts with a motor vehicle crash in the past and the resultant chronic pain issues. Less developed countries, many with nonexistent traffic laws and very large numbers of VRUs walking and cycling along primitive roads, have by far the worst traffic statistics. If you travel, you might want to minimize any time on the roads in places like Africa and south Asia, though the Dominican Republic is an outlier with the highest traffic death rate in the world, according to the UN.
If one moves to a broader context than that of human victims, there could be any number of days of remembrance honoring the many species that have suffered or been nearly or completely eliminated by human actions. The American bison and the whales, the dodo and the passenger pigeon come immediately to mind, but the list is truly long and growing longer. On our visit to the National Mall in DC, we were moved by the memorials to the soldiers of our various wars, but perhaps the most sobering moment came when we visited the basement of the Museum of Natural History, a somewhat forgotten place, or so it looked, where we viewed the stuffed remains of Martha, the last surviving passenger pigeon. Extinction is forever, and that species’ demise had nothing to do with any natural course of events.
So by now you’ve probably figured out that the pictures, here, are for the most part about monuments appropriate to all that has been said. A monument can be a powerful thing. The Holocaust memorial sits across from Boston City Hall in the tourist epicenter that is Quincy Market. Tourists flock from all over the world to this place for all their lighthearted reasons and one wonders about their reactions when they discover this brilliant and powerful remembrance of a low point in human history.
The “ghost bikes” are part of a worldwide phenomenon, placed at the site where a cyclist has been lost due to the violence of traffic. They’re often removed after a year or two, but are a haunting reminder in a similar vein to that of the Holocaust memorial. Should we never forget? There are also three images from a hundred years ago, a long forgotten time when public backlash to the takeover of America’s streets by the automobile (and the new dangers it brought with it, in spades) had led to an inordinate number of children killed in the city streets that until then had been relatively safe places to walk or even to play. Would you believe there were marches and protests and memorials about that, in places like NYC and Pittsburgh and Detroit? The grandest monument of all was in St Louis, while in 1921 1054 children – the number killed on the streets the previous year – marched past 200 “White Star Mothers” in NYC who’d lost a child on the streets.
Unlike our many memorial public displays commemorating those lost in times of war, those monuments dedicated to young victims of 100 years ago and most ghost bikes in recent times tend to be temporary. After all, the manner in which those lives were lost, and which continue to be lost all over the world almost moment by moment as I write this, are not due to intentional acts by combatants in an armed conflict. Indeed, common wisdom tells us the deaths and the injuries suffered by those who survive in the vehicular non-wars are due to “accidents”. The drivers involved never intend to hurt anybody, and sometimes the victims get hurt as a consequence of their own foolish or risky behavior, which makes their demise their own damn fault. All too often the victim and driver are the same person. As the heartless or cynical might put it, “shit happens” and sadly there is some truth to this; it is a dangerous world, and get over it.
That long-ago dismantled monument in St Louis had an inscription on it: “In Memory of Child Life Sacrificed to the Altar of Haste and Recklessness”. In the current day one might place upon that same altar things like “addiction to inebriating substances and distracting mobile devices” and perhaps a few more. What may be truly tragic is how so much behavior by drivers that generates tragedy involving innocent others is in itself quite innocent, behavior that is pretty much socially acceptable.
Most who drink and drive, or drivers who text or who travel a bit too fast in the city of Boston (where enforcement of traffic laws is a joke, as is the “handsfree” law passed with much fanfare a few years back) are simply doing what everybody here does, and they never have a problem – until they do, whereupon most regret their behavior forever. The term “banality of evil” come to mind. It was coined by Hannah Arendt in reference to Adolf Eichmann and many of the Nazi bureaucrats in general, who aided and abetted terrible things, mostly out of sheer thoughtlessness and lack of empathy and the belief they were “just doing their jobs”, but without the “evil” intentions of the most serious Nazi party members. Most people habitually drive with some level of haste between their many frustrating moments of sitting in ever-worsening congestion, and who can blame them?. The sheer banality of driving behavior that leads to violence on the roads may be the most tragic aspect of the whole sad picture, and the reason why nothing changes.
We know what happened a hundred years ago, but where is the outcry today? Well, there’s the International Day of Remembrance for Traffic Victims, something it is likely you never heard of until now, and in this moment you might reflect on what that’s about. Maybe you’ll think about it next year, and tell your friends, but then again perhaps not, as nobody will remind you of it but yourself. There will be no announcement on social media or in the newspaper or on TV and radio. Of course, you can reflect all by yourself on what the day is all about, and even though you think of yourself as a safe and sane and prudent driver who never drinks and drives, who avoids all distractions and never ever drives at all recklessly or in haste whenever you take the wheel, we can all always do better.
What if we all drove like we were on a Mission from God, where the mandate is to protect oneself and everybody else on the road no matter what? This would require that one be intensely aware of the traffic environment all around one at all times and accounting for that, which can take a lot of energy. In Boston it would also require such unusual behavior as slowing down at the yellow light and stopping on red, as well as slowing and stopping to allow pedestrians waiting at crosswalks to proceed across; you might also smile and wave. It would also mean traveling 20-25mph on narrow one way streets, as that is the only speed that is at all safe for unarmored creatures that might show up unexpectedly in the road (if you think that’s too slow, talk to God, who will quickly straighten you out on the physics of it). Of course much of this behavior will arouse the ire of some of those behind you, at times. Those on Missions from God are known to get harassed; it comes with the territory, always has.
If you’re not up to it (this writer admits to being totally inconsistent in these matters, though he’s trying), you might at least avoid madeleines and s’mores or any food that might trigger a reverie while you’re at the wheel. Save it for the coffee shop or your kitchen.
