All the Effectiveness of a Typewriter Eraser

If you are about my age or older you remember back before backspace and delete. Before word processing. Before that magic tape in a Brother electric typewriter that would somehow lift a typed character from a page–but only one or two characters back and only if the typebars were perfectly aligned. Back before White-Out. Back when there were typewriter erasers. Typically disc shaped pink erasers attached to stiff plastic brushes, though some later ones were pencil shaped with a stiff plastic brush at the opposite end of the cylinder.

The thing to know about typewriter erasers, if you’ve never used one, is their incredible ineffectiveness–at least in my hands. Typewriter ink wasn’t designed to be erasable. Rubbing at it hard enough to remove a typo often resulted in a smudgy, discolored spot on the paper at best, a hole worn completely through the paper at worst. Wite Out was an improvement, but a bright white spot remained as evidence of the letter, word or words that had been covered up–not actually removed. The ink-removing tape of my Brother typewriter was better still, though as I mentioned, it had its flaws and limitations, too. Now much if not most of our writing is done on keyboards and appears on screens, and we can erase with a tap of the delete button or use the cut command for larger chunks of text. Still, cyber security experts tell us practically nothing is ever really truly irretrievable–at least not to an expert at such things.

I’ve been thinking about typewriter erasers, and the other methods of removing text but mostly typewriter erasers, a lot recently. I thought about them when I heard earlier this month that the United States Air Force “would deny all transgender service members who have served between 15 and 18 years the option to retire early and would instead separate them without retirement benefits, [meaning]

that transgender service members will now be faced with the choice of either taking a lump-sum separation payment offered to junior troops or be [involuntarily] removed from the service.”

That move is but one of the ramifications of the current administration’s policy of banning all transgender troops from the United States military–a ban upheld by the Supreme Court in this past May. Both the ban and the decision to uphold it are themselves typewriter eraser moments.

I thought about typewriter erasers earlier this week when the U.S. State Department released its annual reports on international human rights. According to NPR, this year’s reports “drastically reduce the types of government repression and abuse that the United States under President Trump deems worthy of criticism.” Categories, such as restrictions on free assembly, unfair elections and punishment of minority groups, previously included in reports dating back to the 1970s, have been eliminated this year, as have any “references to diversity, equity, and inclusion, sexual violence against children[,] and interference with privacy. References to restrictions on political participation[...] government corruption, violence against minorities and LGBTQ people[,] and harassment of human rights organizations were …[also] removed.”

A recent executive order mandated that any exhibits or content deemed "improper, divisive, or [expressing] anti-American ideology" be removed from the Smithsonian's museums–typewriter eraser moment.

Firing of the Librarian of Congress and the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics–typewriter eraser moments.

Hundreds of words and phrases removed from government websites–from “woman” to “Gulf of Mexico”, from “underserved” to “climate change"–typewriter eraser moments.

Threats to jail unhoused people in Washington, DC or give them places to stay “FAR from the Capital”–typewriter eraser moment.

And all the anti-trans legislation introduced over the past five years (and the previous 200 years), also typewriter eraser moments, each and every one.

There is nothing new or unique to the United States about governments, institutions, faith communities, powerful subsets of communities attempting to erase people and ideas from society. Efforts at erasure range from the steadfast refusal to use proper names and pronouns to outright genocide, and include physical violence against bodies, economic suppression, red lining, the creation of ghettos, censorship, book bans, book burning, denial of medical care, mass incarceration, involuntary civil commitment, and bullying among many other tactics.

These efforts are united in their cruelty and destructiveness. Each left, each continues to leave devastation and death in its wake. Paradoxically these efforts are also united in their universal ineffectiveness.

The idea that a theology based on the concept of the Trinity is not Biblically sound did not die with the execution of Michael Servetus, for example. Indeed, the smudges left by that attempt at erasure spread his idea through the ages, so that Servetus’s idea remains one of the bedrock ideas on which Unitarianism, now Unitarian Universalism, is founded.

The colonization the North American continent unfolded as a massive attempt at erasure, successive, simultaneous and on-going massive attempts, in fact, through genocide, forced removal from lands, involuntary boarding schools, cultural suppression and missappropriation, and false narratives. Countless people died, families were torn apart, communities ravaged, languages brought to and over the brink of extinction. The entire land is covered with the still visible and gaping holes created by those destructive but ultimately ineffective erasure efforts. And native peoples today–living run of the mill lives, lives of accomplishment, lives at the edges; on tribal lands, in cities, in small towns, and in homeless encampments; forming relationships, raising families, growing old; resurrecting traditional languages, teaching their histories, preserving practices and rituals, and engaging in every occupation imaginable–Native peoples today are the resilient smudges of those erasure attempts.

The lynching of Matthew Shepherd rubbed a hole clear through his family, his community. And the work of the Matthew Shepard Foundation is a life-giving smudge left behind. Matthew Shepard was killed but not erased, and his death didn’t erase other gay men, or cause a single person to become straight, either.

Removing stories of LGBTQIA families and kids from school libraries and public libraries, purging the United States military of trans personnel, attempting to over-turn Obergefell v. Hodges (the Supreme Court decision that legalized same sex marriage throughout the United States) all these cause real psychic harm and financial hardship to families and individuals, but do not and cannot wipe them, wipe us, out of existence or history.

On and on. No smooth, clear, empty space is ever left behind an attempted erasure of an idea or a person or a group of people. A smudge is left on the paper. A hole is rubbed through the paper. The paper of science or democracy or culture or history still bears evidence of the facts and systems and ideas those who wield the erasers would have obliterated if only they could. The paper that is a family or a community still bears the vibrancy, love and joy, heartbreak and grief, of the people those who wield the erasers would have obliterated if only they could.

None of which is to say attempts at erasure aren’t destructive, life destroying, threats to the well-being not just to the individual and groups and ideas targeted but to society as a whole. As people of faith we are called upon to stop the harm. And one way we do that is by saying to the people who wield the erasers, “Your best efforts will never be successful. The smudges of the people, individuals, ideas that you seek to erase will always remain. But the hole that is the aftermath of your frantic, persistent, ineffective erasing harms our communities, harms our families, harms our neighbors, harms our society. And we will not let you continue. We will say the names of the people you kill, lest they be forgotten. We will spread the ideas you seek to suppress. We will support counter-legislation. We will show up at school board meetings. We will run for school board. Elected officials, we will protest at your local, county, state and congressional offices. We will vote. We will vote every time there is something to vote on. We will buy and sell the books you label a menace. We will tell the stories. We’ll support mutual aid campaigns. We will get to know our neighbors because relationships build resistance and resilience.”

The fabric of our United States, from before we were a country until 2025, is littered with holes left where someone tried to erase someone else, some idea, some group. The day will come when we are bold enough to start mending those holes in earnest, with deliberation–through reparations or truth and reconciliation-type processes or by other means of repair. Today, as the pace of attempts at erasure seems to be accelerating and the methods of erasure are both powerful and insidious, the task before us is to prevent the creation of more holes, taking action at the first sign of the eraser appearing. All of us together and each of us individually, hold the hole-y, holy, fragile fabric of our society in our hands. May we act wisely, prayerfully and daily to preserve it. Amen.