A little while ago, I stumbled across a tweet by a young woman who found a face mask stuffed in her winter coat from last year. She had such a violent reaction she threw the thing across the room. It made me a little angry. I couldn’t grasp the fragility that would solicit such disrelish.

Now I get it.

The human brain possesses an astonishing capacity to forget. Sometimes, it’s crucial to our survival. On an individual level, psychologists call it motivated forgetting. Societies have that same ability.