Time for spring cleaning

Last edited Wed Aug 16, 2017, 11:28 AM - Edit history (9)

Collectively, as a society and as a culture, it's possible to a packrat, in a way that is similar to an individual who is a packrat. You keep clutter in closets and basements and under the bed. Perhaps it's laziness, like you don't want to go through the mental work or physical work of throwing them away. Perhaps you have complicated feelings for them, including some sentimental attachments to a very fuzzy memory of a crazy long-dead great-uncle. It seems wrong to throw out his pocket-knife or his stone flint if it's all that remains of him on this earth except his bones under the ground.

I tend to try to hang on to things myself. It's part of a secret little sentimental daydream I have, that all human beings are redeemable, that there are no "throwaway people". "Redemption" and "compassion" are two of my favorite words (the former not so much as a concrete Christian belief but more as a literature theme that plays out in the great morality play of the collective human psychodrama). If that's hard to understand, picture me as a 7-year old, decorating a pathetic scrappy 3-foot tall scrub tree -- a "trash tree", a pitiful little Australian pine on the edge of a ditch -- with tinsel and a couple of ornaments at Christmas. In my child's mind, it deserved to be a Christmas tree as much as the six foot tall Scotch pine in the house. I imagined that underneath its ungainly ugly shape, it must have had a heart and an innocent dream, too.

It's hard to throw the house clutter away. Even if we don't think we personally will have a use for an object someday, we imagine it might be useful to someone else. To our children perhaps, to inform them or educate them about the past.

But our "possessions" possess us, too. Some of them like a horcrux carry bad memories, and like a bad virus unearthed and accidentally re-activated in a sci-if movie, they can become a danger. As long as those possessions exist, even if they stay under our beds or in our closets, or god forbid, on our walls as paintings, they are retained as furniture in our minds as well. When we finally take the time and get the energy to throw them away -- when we judge and clean and sort and discard what is not truly useful -- we find ourselves psychologically freed.

It's not normal to hang on to the remnants of old ideas that we don't believe in, or to souvenirs of bad ideas. Ridding ourselves of these confederate statues -- these horcruxes -- will be healthy. It's time to do spring cleaning. Like spring cleaning, it will give us energy and inspire creativity.

A lot of us would like to do spring cleaning on the House and the Senate, too, and certainly on the White House. To accomplish that, we need to do spring cleaning on our election process, too, and on our political discourse that is still so polluted with failed ideas like trickledown economics and corporations-are-people-too. And we need to find ways to connect young people to service projects and the work of building real community, so that they will be less receptive to hate groups that promise purpose and camaraderie. Sounds daunting, doesn't it? Maybe we will find some new energy, once we start taking action. These monuments tied to traitors who fought for slavery? Take them down.