A lot has happened in America within the past month, and citizens of this country are wondering if we as a nation can recover from Jan. 6, 2021. What is the desire to recover from the insurrection? What does even “recovering” something mean? Recovering and learning do not always go hand in hand. A lot of the time, it seems they are counterintuitive to each other. Our society should start creating the process of progressively understanding a situation instead of recovering from it.

Think about a time when you lost something, your car keys or a wallet, and you eventually recovered the item and moved on. What are people trying to achieve when they recover? The correlation with the past is a unique thought process; there are always these memories stuck in our minds, and people seem desperate to retrieve them – but why? The obsession with recreating or re-imagining what was is a strange phenom that everyone feels. 

On Jan. 6, a group of insurrectionists, or really terrorists, believed that storming the U.S. capital would bring back the “old America” and restore what had been lost. They were trying to recover something, whatever they believe previous America was and should be. However, it was not brought back after the insurrection. So, what is the national recovery process for the aftermath?

The idea of recovery first should be reinterpreted as a progressive understanding. An understanding is the ability to comprehend. Understanding a situation is fine, but how does one move on from it? The mindset that everyone should be in is this: how can a society take a new stance on recovering?

Instead of pondering the outcome of the past, people should look at how to move a conversation forward, while discussing all the possibilities of new outcomes. Where is the beauty in remembering an event or idea that you can no longer grasp? To progressively understand is to acknowledge the past but also recognize the beauty in creating something entirely new. Whatever this “old America” was is now lost, but not forgotten. The idea still lingers in the back of people’s minds as an easier time for them, although not an easier time for minorities.

This idea of recovery is a selfish one, one that thrives within an individualistic society. Recovering who you are or what you have lost will never create a forward motion. You’ll only go backward in time, while you cease to exist, and living in some kind of fantasy world. There is nothing wrong with fantasy itself, but when someone creates a false reality, then problems of delusion begin to settle in.

If you are seeking an answer and wish to recover something from your past, then maybe that’s okay, but wouldn’t it be easier to understand how something works, or how the event could have happened and then creating new conversations to avoid history repeating itself twice?

There is no clear answer or solution right now that can be given, but there does seem to something off-putting about recovering what “I” have lost, and not seeking to create a society where a majority of the people understand and fix the problem in a forward motion.