Your Tweet About Ferguson Could Change History

Your Tweet About Ferguson Could Change History

There are three types of memory that interest me: personal memory, the memory held by an individual, institutional memory, the consciousness of a corporate entity, and collective memory, the memory compiled, curated, and held by a community. This third form is both the most powerful and the least under our control. People don’t get to “opt in” or “opt out” of collective memories. They are living, breathing entities, or seem to be at least, that stick to friend groups, communities, generations, etc. like a small tick. A tick tucked into the nook behind your ear, just out of sight but never out of mind for long.

Unfortunately, the nature of collective memory tends to lend itself better to tragedy than triumph. Lives of violence, or lived in fear of violence, include inevitable wounds. The collective memories are the scar tissue that builds up to heal over and protect the bearer. While the scar might fade or blend into the patchwork of life’s experiences, it never truly disappears. Tragedies that have enormous collective memories attached to them include 9/11, the Vietnam War, and now, for many, the events transpiring in Ferguson, MO.

Some might say that the riots and protests in Ferguson are the result of a much deeper collective memory themselves. I agree with them. A memory of oppression, enslavement, and abuse does not just disappear. For while legislation might change and progress be purported, it is the tales we tell that are the true marker of societies advance, and in Ferguson those tales were grim for long before the shooting of Michael Brown.

For the past two and a half weeks, we’ve been looking at Ferguson topically – the number of arrests (160+), stores looted (10+), cops on the ground (a lot), and civilians injured (dozens). We’ve been, in a distilled sense, tallying scores in an effort to quantify the unquantifiable. In all of this counting and countering, we overlook the greatest impact of Ferguson, the collective memory that is being formed. With wars, conflicts, and natural disasters, the news vans will soon leave. It has already dropped from the front page to the third, and soon it will disappear even from the very bottom of the very last page of our national newspapers. Without the news to remind us, most people will forget, not having been close enough or invested enough in the implications of race related riots in the USA in the 21st century to dwell on it any longer.

This is when the collective memory takes hold. It’s claws sink in, knitting together the sides of the wound but not obscuring it entirely. There it will wait, lingering, morphing to the trends and times, and monitoring the climate. Eventually, it will burst forth again, because memory can never be held in forever.

As observers, we have the rare opportunity to change the way this memory will manifest. Our actions and reactions, our refusal to accept abuse of power and continued support of the young people of Ferguson, both those taking part in peaceful protests and those who’ve become caught-up in the mayhem, will shape the way these events are remembered. In an era of social media, Tweets and Facebook posts might not change the world, but they do have the potential to change the way the collective memory of recent events is formed, and in turn, how the future will play out. If we speak up, we can shift the memory to one of hope and the real possibility of change. But, if Ferguson feels abandoned, forgotten, or further marginalized, the memory will fester just below the surface, waiting for a reason to reignite the flame.