The Myth of Going Back

Just a couple of weeks ago, I was speaking with a friend about a book they read. I can’t remember it to save my life, but I remember the topic. The book talked about how different cultures view their heroes. What really struck my friend was how so many cultures carry the negative and the positive aspects of their heroes through the centuries; while Western culture tends to clean the heroes record to only show their positive aspects. It was a great topic of conversation about how we may be missing out on a lot of grace we could be sharing with each other because we only choose to see each other in distinct, separate categories of good and bad. 

That conversation happened before the events of this past week. At the time, we were having an intellectual exchange about how we view our mentors and heroes. In the aftermath of Baton Rouge, Falcon Crest, and Dallas, I’m seeing how this tendency to structure our society into zero-sum, either/or, good/bad categories makes it impossible to find a future. In the midst of it all, there is a theme being shared that is a myth, or maybe we should call it a lie, that there is a place we should get back to. It’s a statement that at one point in our past, these things were not problems, and so we should just go back tot he way things were. They way we used to respect one another, the way we used to believe in one another, the way it was when things made sense.

There is a real problem with that kind of statement, however. Aside from how this mode of thinking is so pessimistic of our future, or dismissive of progress, the idea that “we used to be better than this,” is just a lie. The truth is that we weren’t better. To say we were better erases our history, but forgetting our history is also not new to us. A history professor said, “Ninety Americans, ninety percent of the time, will forget what happened ninety seconds ago.” I tie this in with what I was saying at the beginning of the post. We wash and clean our history until our heroes are larger than life, and devoid of any flaw. We have done it for a long time, and it becomes visible the moment you try and bring it up.

The moment you bring the fact that we almost complete eliminated a people group from the face of the planet, (Native Americans) and that we should acknowledge our responsibility for that, you, “Hate America.”

If you acknowledge that people of color have been crying out against systemic injustice, such as police brutality, for centuries, you “Hate Cops.” 

It’s painful for us to remember that we were never perfect, because we have spent so many years constructing a narrative where we were. We glamorized the plight of western settlers to allow us to forget the struggle of Native Peoples. It’s easier that way. It makes for games we can play as children, and movies we can watch with ready conflict. We even told ourselves that we had already dealt with our radical conflicts. This way we could set them in historical pieces to be looked at under glass and held up as “how we used to be.” 

The truth is, there is no good place to go back to. We were never as good as we thought we were. America, including, and probably especially, the Church, was never as just as our ideals proclaim. We were never as free as our documents say we should be. We were never as equal as we declared we would be. The point is not that America once occupied a blessed place and all we have to do is go back to it. 

In truth, what we did was set a rather high bar, and we have been trying to live up to it ever since. We have become more just, more equal, more loving, but it’s always been a struggle. The struggle never stopped, it just changed. We went from working on one thing, to working on another. We tried to legislate against the racism that existed in law, but now we have to work on the racism that exists in our hearts. We have to contend with the violence that exists in our society, and we have to attend to the stories we are telling ourselves, looking for the lies. And we have to do all this, because we can’t go back.

O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you,

and grant that they may know and understand what things they ought to do, 

and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them; 

through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you 

and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. 

Amen.

(Prayer from the Episcopal Church USA)