Together in the graveyard

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

There’s a patch of shade behind my house hidden under the drooping boughs of ocean spray shrubs. The only markers now separating it from the surrounding forest are the foxgloves that spring up to paint the patch pink each year, but when I was a child there was a graveyard there.

The dogs belonged to the previous family and must have died 20 years before I was born. By the time I was old enough to remember, the wooden stakes marking their graves had all but rotted away, though one still showed the remnants of the name “Rusty.” As a child, I would often visit them and lay a flower on their resting place — careful not to step on them. I even took my dogs to meet Rusty and his unknown friend to make sure they weren’t lonely.

The dogs were part of my home’s history, and even though I knew nothing more than the fragment of a name, that history was alive for me. Those dogs had loved and been loved, and my 6-year-old mind understood that enough to respect them where they lay long after their families were gone.

We don’t emphasize that connection enough when we learn about our shared human history.

In high school, they showed us pictures of lynchings and men burning themselves alive. We were taught that people died horribly because of racism, colonialism or political differences, but even as we studied their lives, we stripped them of their humanity. They were little more than statistics to memorize for the midterm.

When we treat our history as a compilation of emotionless facts entirely separate from ourselves, we lose sight of the purpose of remembrance.

We don’t study humanity’s atrocities because we want a good grade, or because we want to make someone feel bad, we study them because we have to remember that every single person who came before us was a human being who loved and listened to music and ate breakfast. They were a neighbor, a spouse, a coworker.

If we forget that they were human, then we’re blindsided when history repeats itself.

When we’re taught to reduce the My Lai massacre or the Shoah to the number of dead, it becomes second nature to do the same with the Israel-Hamas war and any future horrors. Then, even as history unfolds before our eyes, we maintain an emotional distance that allows us to justify inaction.

The fact is the same whether we remember someone as a villain or a victim. We can use words like “monster” to describe Hitler and Stalin, but we have to remind ourselves that they weren’t mythical embodiments of evil sitting on flaming thrones — they were human, and that’s far more terrifying.

When we imagine that the perpetrators of atrocities are inhuman or somehow other, we ignore the warning signs shown by our contemporaries because surely they can’t be evil if they’re a regular at my coffee shop or a member of my community. If they were evil, they’d have devil horns as a tail.

But evil isn’t always obvious. It can be mundane. It can even sound appealing, because the uncomfortable truth is that evil is as natural to our species as love. Pretending otherwise is a soothing illusion that welcomes tragedy with open arms and closed eyes.

We are, all of us, together in the graveyard of our history. We have a choice to either see ourselves and our loved ones in the dead, or to pretend that the past, present and future are entirely separate and cannot influence one another. The decision will save or doom us.

If a child can empathize with pets who passed long before she was born, surely in our adult lives we can come to understand the pains and crimes of our ancestors and remember that, due to our shared humanity, we are capable of either continuing or breaking the cycle.