Memorial Day hits very differently now: memories are breakthroughs
A couple of months ago, I was cleaning out my parents’ house. At the same time, the current administration was busy dismantling the very government infrastructures that kept my grandfather, my father, and occasionally me, gainfully employed.
My grandfather, a World War II veteran from the Pacific theater, worked as an accountant for eleven years at Mare Island Naval Shipyard and was responsible for funding the construction of nuclear submarines. Did his service matter anymore, especially now that the country is backsliding towards the very evils he had put his life on the line to combat?
My father, a Vietnam-era Navy veteran, who worked at various agencies through a thirty-five year career. For his retirement, he got a signed piece of paper and six months later, a Parkinsons diagnosis. Does his sacrifice matter now?
I was cleaning out all of this military and public service memorabilia from a time when public service and the people who did it were actually valued. I was doing this after years — my entire lifetime almost — of being told over and over again that government employees are lazy do-nothings, a scourge on the system. This stereotype has been the norm since Ronald Reagan popularized the quote “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’ “.
At my time working in various government agencies over the past two decades, even government employees believed this trope while also collecting government paychecks and benefits. Even my father’s dying wish was not to be remembered at all: the final wishes of a man brought down from depression, PTSD, and Parkinsons.
At the time I was cleaning out my parents’ house, I had also witnessed the USAID lobby memorial that my husband designed years ago dismantled in pieces, along with the agency who employed the people memorialized in it after being killed in the line of duty. People who made the ultimate sacrifice working towards American ideals, and now purposely removed from collective memory.
At first all of this happening at the same time was initially very upsetting to me, but now I see my own memories with a different lens. Now I see that recalling my memories, and sharing them, as something that I now need to do. I need to share my own memories as a counter to people who are actively trying to rewrite the truth.
Parts of our collective American memory wants to obfuscate truths and prop up lies. People right now are actively removing memorials of service — particularly services performed by women and minorities. At the same time, they are also trying to convince the public that alcoholics, drug users, and dog killers are worthy of government leadership positions and their accompanying default of respect.
They want to use what is left of government agencies, in no small part, to gatekeep public benefits: that is, by making government online systems harder to use so that people who need benefits have to jump though hoops — built by mostly well-meaning product teams — to get them. This recent story in Georgia is just one example of an online system built to make getting benefits more difficult. In other words, funding towards certain programs are going towards the companies that are building preventative systems instead of the people who actually need funding.
This is part of reinforcing the same story some people are telling: government doesn’t work, it’s wasteful, and that it’s run by incompetents. The only thing that can combat this gaslighting is our memories. We need these memories now so that we remember that we can do better, and we need these memories later so that we can rebuild what is now being destroyed. As design an product professionals, we have a role in this: designing usable systems right now is a radical act, and it is going to be a useful skill once these systems start to get rebuilt.
If we are going to build a system that benefits more people, we are going to need to remember that we all once had a higher purpose.
