On a picturesque California day, residents gathered at the Santa Barbara Cemetery to commemorate the 245th anniversary of the nation’s founding. Some residents wore masks, though most who gathered on the lawn to observe the speakers and performers assembled by the Pierre Claeyssens Veterans Foundation were mask-free, smiling, and dressed in the colors of the flag. While the ceremony was focused on celebrating the birth of the nation, the director of the foundation, John Blankenship, United States Navy (ret.), made clear that such a celebration was necessary in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Those who gathered did so to collectively recall loss and to reflect on the experiment of democracy. In a normal year, an event like this would have been held on Memorial Day, and on Independence Day veterans and local organizations would have participated in a march down State Street in Santa Barbara’s famed July 4th Parade. Alas, the past year has been far from normal.
As the Kim Collins Quartet played songs like "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" and "God Bless America," audience members sang, hummed, and danced along, sharing in a long-overdue moment of energized collective euphoria. Residents of this idyllic seaside community longed for a sense of togetherness. Together they were led in the Pledge of Allegiance by resident and Vietnam veteran Lt. Colonel Patricia Rumpza, United States Air Force (ret.), and were led in an invocation by Lt. Colonel Jack Armstrong, United States Army (ret.), also a Vietnam veteran. As an ethnographer that studies collective memory, I have had the privilege of observing the power recalling a shared past has to unite and reinforce bonds with Vietnam veterans across the Central Coast. Commemorative ceremonies like the observance of Independence Day provide us with the opportunity to imagine communities often separated through race, religion, ethnicity, and gender as unified. Memory is not a fixed point in the past, it is something we are working on in the present and being worked on by.
This year we reimagine our communities as we reimagine normalcy. In this past year we have seen the hope of normalcy renewed by a change in presidential administrations and glimpsed the possibility of a racially just America through the recognition of June 19 "Juneteenth" as a federal holiday and the sentencing and conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd.