If you scroll back in time through my Facebook — please don’t — there are a lot of strange updates and pictures from my formative years.

Every now and then I’ll get a notification reminding me of a cringe-inducing old status or picture, show my friends for an easy laugh and quickly delete it from existence.

Pictures of my bumbling 15-year-old self with straightened, shoulder-length hair and claims of how much I love cheeseburger flavoured Doritos are scarce to find nowadays because of this.

The notifications are becoming more and more infrequent as I delete the posts from my timeline and with that, I begin to forget the social-media gaffes that plagued my youth.

But this raises the question — should we allow ourselves to forget our past blunders?

Monument and memorial controversies are rife throughout Canada and the United States as of late.

Earlier this year, Victoria, British Columbia became the first Canadian city to remove a statue of our first prime minister, Sir John A. MacDonald.

MacDonald was a large proponent of residential schools and the segregation of indigenous people.

According to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, at least 110 civil-war monuments have been removed since it started counting in 2015 after a white supremacist killed nine people at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

While statues obviously aren’t the lone cause of the long history of intolerance and fanaticism in the United States, rallying behind statues of a dead rebellion still occurs.

At the centre of the white nationalist rally that killed one and injured 12 last August in Charlottesville, Virginia, was a large sculpture of Commander Robert E. Lee on a horse (which is still there).

These kinds of disputes extend across the world. Spain is set to exhume the body of its former dictator Francisco Franco from his memorial tomb in Valley of the Fallen, which is placed on a mass grave of victims of the Spanish civil war.

To this day, people still hold demonstrations at the tomb. This results in some shocking images of people raising their arms in a fascist salute to the fallen tyrant who was responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people.

Like it or not, effigies like these have become symbolic of the incitement of hatred and racism.

The word monument has origins in the Latin verb monere, which means to remind or to warn.

Reminding us of our transgressions and warning us it could happen again.

I know, even without the once constant reminders from Facebook, I won’t make the same mistakes.