In the late 20th century, the “disappeared” referred to citizens, mostly in Latin America, who were arrested and murdered or imprisoned without due process or trial. The state, or in some cases terrorist groups or drug cartels, would then deny any knowledge of these individuals to their friends and families. They simply vanished.

We don’t hear much about the “disappeared” these days, though the practice continues. Mexico’s state of Jalisco, for example, has over 12,500 cases of disappeared people. Fliers clutter the walls, parks, and shop windows of the city, posted by relatives looking for their spouses, daughters, and sons, many of them “disappeared” by drug cartels.

The United States also has ways of erasing people.

On Aug. 28, in Richmond’s Capitol Square, a work crew removed Stonewall Jackson’s statue along with two other Confederate statues. In the last 10 years, the state has torn down other statues of Confederates, most notably Robert E. Lee’s in Charlottesville, Va. That particular disappearance proved especially malicious, as the statue was chopped into pieces and melted.

Lee offers an interesting case of how the left works to destroy or distort the American past. In his article, “Five American Presidents Who Praised Robert E. Lee,” Lafayette Cahill repeats Theodore Roosevelt’s praise of Lee, that he possessed “that serene greatness of soul characteristic of those who most readily recognize the obligations of civic duty.” FDR called Lee “one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen.” In explaining why he kept a picture of Lee on his office wall, Dwight Eisenhower summed up the Confederate general as “one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation.”

Cahill then correctly notes: “Today, it is simply unimaginable for a leader in politics to talk about Robert E. Lee in this way. Anyone who would be brave enough to do so would inevitably be branded a ‘racist’ and bullied into withdrawing their remarks.”

I’ve written before of these cultural excisions, but recently the thought occurred that a relationship exists between disappearing parts of our history and the “going no-contact” movement, particularly the growing trend of breaking off all contact with family or friends over political disagreements. You voted for Donald Trump? Be gone, evil one. You oppose open borders? You’re a racist. You support traditional marriage and the traditional family? You’re a walking joke, away with you.

In his defense of the British soldiers who participated in the “Boston Massacre,” John Adams noted, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

I would add that “facts are inconvenient things.” Those who removed the Lee statues ignored why those statues were erected in the first place and why Americans held (and still hold) Lee in high esteem. The destructors reveal an ignorance of history – that by his own lights Lee was no traitor, placing his sword and his honor at the disposal of his beloved Virginia rather than side with the federal government. Like all human beings, he had flaws, yet for well over a century most Americans regarded him a hero.

Those who go no-contact show this same lack of judgment and nuance. Their politics eradicate the personal. They disappear the people who love them, consequently deleting the good along with what they consider the bad.

In “No Contact: How a Seductive Ideology Broke Families and Friendships and How We Can Repair Them,” Noelle Mering lays bare how politics, therapeutic practices, attacks on the family, and our heavy emphasis on victimhood and egocentricity have combined to create this blind ideology.

In her previous work, “Awake, Not Woke,” Mering gives us the formula linking this erasure of history and personal relationships: “This book is an attempt to name what is poisoning us. In order to do that, we have to understand the history, premises, and tactics of woke ideology, which is fundamentally an ideology of rupture.”

And right there is the connecting link between the attempts to erase history and the no-contact movement: the ideology of rupture.

For decades, we have seen this ideology of rupture at work. Class, race, sex, age, and generation: whether intentionally or not, academics, news commentators, politicians, and others have pounded wedges into the American culture, dividing us rather than seeking ways to bind us together as a people.

And as is so often the case, only we as citizens have the power to repair these rancorous divisions. It’s up to us to refute those who spit on our historical past; it’s up to us to overcome the urge to isolate ourselves from friends and family because of politics and religion; it’s up to us to find the humility to know when we’re wrong and admit our ignorance.

Rejecting the ideology of rupture is the first step toward binding up the wounds in our families and in our country.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image credit: Deviant Art, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0