15 years ago today I was supposed to go to the circus. Barnum and Bailey’s if I recall correctly. For quite some time, the circus being canceled was the only way the day registered with me as being out of the normal.
That’s also the only complete memory I have of that day. I think I remember seeing smoke from just outside our New Jersey apartment. I’m pretty sure a large number of kids were picked up and taken home from school early. Was it that day or the next day when I finally got around to asking my dad what terrorism was and why they kept talking about it on TV?
9/11 has since been intrinsically linked with the refrain “Never Forget.” And yet, for me and a large portion of my generation, our memories of a day that forever changed the world we’d go on to grow up in are hazy. There are scenes here and there that we recall; my roommate remembers his teacher crying and little else, another friend remembers seeing a burning building on the TV. A year later she had a moment of silence in school, but she wasn’t sure why.
Which raises the question, 15 years later, how appropriate are the responses to and the remembrances of the tragedy? For me, the significance of the day could not immediately be understood and today, I tend to respond to reminders of the event in a rather unfitting nonchalant manner. I have a close friend who I play ping pong with often, and almost every time we play, the score hits 9-11. It seems the process of calling out the score and the subsequent serve is always a bit more rushed, as if we’d rather not dwell on that score for long. Today’s high school freshmen likely learned of the incident from memes claiming “Bush did 9/11” and “jet fuel doesn’t melt steel beams” that wryly mock conspiracy theories while at the same time making light of the tragedy. People had to actually be told not to play Pokemon Go at the 9/11 memorial site, perhaps the most egregious indicator of how a moment’s terrible aura is already fading from our collective memory.
Of course, many of these reactions reflect a level of insulation from the attacks themselves. Many will have stronger reactions simply because they were more closely affected. There are those like me, who were tangentially affected. Extra security at local Fourth of July Fireworks for the next few years and lost time during TSA “random screenings” implemented after the attacks, all minor inconveniences compared to the upheavals suffered by those whose family members were deployed in any of the subsequent facets of the “War on Terror.” And obviously, none were as affected as those who lost loved ones in the attacks themselves. For them, 9/11 is a personal tragedy, and forgetting simply isn’t a choice.
And yet, this tragedy blurs the line between personal and national. On paper, four flights were hijacked, three buildings hit and nearly 3,000 people killed. Simply quantifying it in that sentence makes me feel sick, as if I’m depersonalizing and downplaying the tragedy. Perhaps to avoid that, we extend the effects of the attack to the national level when we say that the entire nation’s trajectory was hijacked and that the entire country from sea to shining sea was attacked. And that too seems disingenuous given that on one hand, all Americans were victimized and yet subsequent hate crimes against Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs and others betrayed a lack of belief in their Americanness. Sadly, this belief is still at the forefront of political discussion fifteen years later while the unity that emerged from the attack on our country waned quickly.
It’s as if we as a nation needed a collective grief counselor or a therapy session, some sort of processing that both established the facts, dispelled the resulting fictions, and reached some level of closure. Instead, we got wars, politicization of monuments and mosques, and most recently, a truly disgusting demagogue whose undeniable racial prejudices prompt him to fabricate stories about rooftop celebrations of a national catastrophe. Maybe it’s his divisive rhetoric with the backdrop of a renewed terror threat that makes this anniversary more somber than any other but I have to ask in disbelief, did it really only take fifteen years, a blip in a nation’s history, for us to accept lies and racial division propped up in the name of one of our greatest national tragedies?
Or maybe all of this analysis is simply a futile attempt on my part to even articulate how I think about 9/11. I’ve been to Ground Zero and Freedom Tower and for one of the very few times in my life I was speechless. Maybe we commemorate such tragedies with moments of silence because we literally don’t have the words to respond. Hell, I’m over 800 words into this act of intended catharsis and I’ve only managed to make myself feel frustrated. Frustrated by my inability to aptly memorialize the tragedy, by our national inability to do the same, by the reality of a world where airplanes become weapons, by the fact that I’m completely conflicted on whether we can or even should “get over” such a tragedy.
Counterintuitively almost, I think this frustration will ensure that I Never Forget. Every anniversary of 9/11 will come with this need to articulate a response, one that balances a loss of faith in the full goodness of humanity with appreciation of the awe-inspiring acts of heroism on that fateful day while encapsulating the whole range of human emotions found in between those two extremes. Till then, an annual moment of silence will most articulately say all I can about a day we cannot, should not, and hopefully will not forget.
