At the Dawn of the New Year, We Can Remember to Forget

Another day cracks open. Momentarily the light is without color. Restless thoughts have not yet gathered to weigh down the mind. Dawn has no memory. It is the optimist’s time. In the back-shadows of daybreak we allow ourselves to believe that anything is possible.

“The first hour of the morning is the rudder of the day,” the old Congregationalist Henry Ward Beecher used to preach.

Dawn is also a word we use to describe the turning of the calendar. As in, the dawn of a new year.

So how much of this coming New Year will arise, dawn-like and optimistic, from our hopes? How much will carry forward from our scarred memories? Which way will the rudder steer us?

Historians say that if we aren’t mindful of our past, we are doomed to repeat it. But I wonder. The past is the original double-edged sword: If we carry it too close to our hearts, aren’t we sure to be doomed just the same? Historians wouldn’t have much to say about that, would they?

Americans are criticized for their disregard of history. Sometimes with good reason. But not always.

The dawn of a new year is a moment to remember to forget.

Our grudges and prejudices are not as deeply set as those in the Mideast, or in Kashmir, or in Belfast, or in Central Africa. For that, above all, we must be thankful.

In the morning light we can still launder our memories, wash away crusty resentments before they become stains. Perhaps we will leave a blind spot. Better that than seeing only red.

I have always been fond of stories like the one told of Clara Barton, the feminist who founded the Red Cross. She had been done an injustice years earlier.

“Don’t you remember?” a friend asked.

“No,” Barton replied, “I distinctly remember forgetting that.”

This United States was founded on the ideal of amnesia. The founders paid little heed to the lesson of history: That people could not govern themselves. “The experience of other nations will afford little instruction ... “ said Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper 70.

Americans are all the progeny of people from elsewhere, and that includes native Americans too. North America is not the cradle of humankind, and not the birthplace of civilization. Our people left those places, whether willingly or not. Dawn broke here--12,000 years ago or last week. Fresh hope supplanted posthumous memories.

That is why Americans tend to prefer the new over the old. Progress outweighs tradition on these shores. That is our own tradition. It is the stuff of which we’re made. Originality owes no debt to the past.

My parents’ generation, after suffering the Great Depression and World War II, made an art form of forgetting. Subsequent generations came to wonder if we missed too much. We’ve reached back, a la “Roots” and “multiculturalism,” for what we may learn of ourselves from our ancestors.

The dawn of a new year is a moment to remember not to forget: There is a vast difference between knowing and living the past.

The past is prologue, the Bard said. “The past is a bucket of ashes,” replied Carl Sandburg. The past is always encumbered.

According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, the sun will rise at 6:59 a.m. where I live on Jan. 1. In New York, at 7:27 a.m. In Kabul, at 6 o’clock sharp.

Time to recalibrate, look ahead, adjust the rudder. In the quiet dawn light, we draw up our optimism.

Anything is possible, and in this private moment we resolve anew to make it so.

H.L. Mencken, whose scalding wit set the standard for 75 years of news commentators to follow, once resolved to be “a skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own.” The proper way for a person to argue, he wrote, was “by assuming that his opponent is as decent a man as he is, and just as honest--and perhaps, after all, right.”

There’s a resolution worth remembering for the dawn of a new year.