I watched this house move a few weeks ago, saw it severed from its foundation and raised on steel bars and connected to a truck and moved a few lots away. I saw it, I took pictures of it, I remarked on it. And today, walking by the lot where the house used to stand, I thought "what used to be here?" The basement has been filled with dirt, the top covered in sod, and even the lines of sod have wedded together so that it's almost impossible to say that anything was ever there.
I'm one of those people who remembers pretty much everything -- conversations from grade school, names, big experiental things, little detaily things... But this act of forgetting made me think of all the things we must insist on remembering, no matter how much dirt, grass, or time has filled in the hole. Not the house. I don't care about the house.
Revisionist history has damaged our collective memory. Remember when we were told there was a connection to Iraq and the 9/11 attacks? When U.N. weapons inspectors searched for months for "weapons of mass destruction" and found nothing? When we were told that all Americans would have access to affordable healthcare? That children weren't going to be left behind??
People want us to forget. Forget we were lied to, forget we ever had a choice. What good is it to insist that 2+2=4 if everyone else swears it is 5? Reality is collective mythology. Lay some sod and change the story.
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