Tony Chiado

A couple years ago now, my grandmother died from old age. In her last few years of life, she had ever-worsening dementia. Her memory faded in and out through the months and years until she was a shell of her former self. Today, I think we have a sort of American Dementia.

Dementia is a unique hell. It breeds fear, uncertainty, alienation… anger. The slippage of memory is disorienting. As a collective, American society has forgotten the essence of its cherished moments: what they felt like and why they had to be experienced to realize a self-expressed moral imperative: to build a nation that empowers all.

American Dementia has dismembered our collective memory of Reconstruction and WWII, of the Civil Rights Movement and the Immigrant Experience. Unable to lean on those memories, we’ve retreated into fear, uncertainty, alienation, and anger. We now see our longtime neighbors as nefarious actors.

American Dementia separates the nation from its historic virtues because we no longer remember that we once held those virtues. We fought fascism. Now we’ve become it. The 20th century was one of progress toward a more just nation. In our struggle to remember that, we have demonized it now.

If Dementia comes about as a Type-III Diabetes as theorized, one can understand American Dementia as being brought about by the sugary rot of social media. Against the onslaught of algorithms and hyper-targeted propaganda, how can American society keep its wits and hold to a shared memory?

This is not to say that America has ever been a perfect nation, but it has always been one with a memory and a conscience striving to improve. I believe that. I can’t say the same for the present moment. This is a country that has lost its memory and barely remembers its past and what it aspired to.