Recently I completed a citizenship exam exemption form for an Iraqi patient. She was shattered. Completely shattered. Unable to clean or cook, shop or bank. Lost in time and place. What city did she live in? America. What season is it? Summer, as snow fell outside.

Her husband had given up his job to care for her.

She had PTSD, psychotic depression, nightmares that ran into her days.

In Iraq, she had seen things humans should not see.

Her father and brothers killed on the street.

Her daughter burned to death.

What she had seen had broken her mind.

And in the stories her husband–not her, she was unable to process–shared, I heard echoes of the genocide of the Armenian people. Of the death of my own ancestors.

My great great grandfather killed on the streets.

My great great aunt burned alive, her dress set on fire. Drowned in a well.

History repeats itself. History will forget, and as soon as it does, it returns.

“Who, after all, remembers the Armenians?” Hitler asked as he launched the holocaust.

And who, after all, protects the Armenians today, as Azerbaijani forces seek to annihilate the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh?

(Please contact your House Representative to urgently push for U.S. leadership in the OSCE Minsk Group peace process. American leadership is needed to protect Armenia and Artsakh.)

In 2015, on what was designated the 100 year anniversary of the Armenian genocide, though killings began before and continued after, the nonprofit Facing History and Ourselves provided resources to teach the teachers about the first genocide of the 20th century. The first exercise in their handbook was an identity exercise. Who am I?

Who am I? And who are “we”? Who are “them”?

Genocide begins when we split into us and them. Without an us and a them, there is no genocide.

No Armenians, no Turks, no Azerbaijanis.

No Germans, no Jews.

No White, no Black.

No Red, no Blue.

In 2012, a friend’s husband began reading Infowars.

In 2014, he shared his conviction that the United States was heading to civil war, blacks versus whites. I scoffed when she told me.

In 2016, he voted for Trump.

In June 2020, he brought a gun into their home for the first time, a semi-automatic handgun with 60 bullets, preparing for violent confrontation.

“Don’t worry” he said to their children on election night 2020. “No matter what happens today, Trump remains president.”

He is armed and preparing for street level violence in an American civil war. He is not alone.

In the hate of Americans, the schism of Trump and anti-Trump supporters, do we see a precursor to genocide? Only one side is preparing for violence.

How do we heal our divided nation?

How do we hold together our diverse communities?

How do we heal an individual mind broken by violence?

How do we heal a community broken by historic injustice and present hostility?

Healing takes a lifetime, or many lifetimes over generations. It takes strength and love and compassion. Truth and reconciliation. It takes remembrance, and forgiveness.

Our individual minds can not remain broken, forever stuck in a torturous past. Then we cannot live.

Neither can we forget the past. Then we are doomed to repeat it.

How do we move forward?