Never Forget? We Already Have
Today is the sixteenth-year anniversary of 9/11, which is a remarkable fact in and of itself. For those of us who were alive at the time — particularly those of us living in New York — it seemed as if the world would never be the same. Surely this would be a moment in our history where we could delineate the period before the attack and the period after it. We would be a different America with a redefined purpose in the world.
And in some ways that proved to be true. But for the most part, it wasn’t.
The legacy of 9/11 can still be felt in our continued military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in our overseas conflicts with al-Qaeda. But the majority of Americans are as physically and emotionally removed from those conflicts as though they were playing a game of Halo.
The American soldiers lost in the field of battle are always someone else’s terribly young sons and daughters. We feel a tug of remorse, let out a brief sigh for young life wasted, then turn to the page of the paper or click the next channel on the TV in order to distract us.
Whatever lessons we were supposed to have learned during 9/11 clearly haven’t stuck. The tragedy of 9/11 was supposed to unify us as a country, yet we’re more fractured as ever. September 11 was supposed to reify our faith in our country’s principles, yet we’re just as cynical about our government’s intentions (often with good reason).
“Never forget” is a phrase that, like a used piece of chewing gum, has been chewed over so much that it’s lost all its flavor.
“Never forget” has become political pabulum out of the mouths of politicians and pundits who use it to manipulate our shared cultural sense memory of that now decade-and-a-half-ago event.
“Never forget” is intoned over somber highlight reels of destruction and chaos meant to draw easy tears but not sustained reflection.
The truth is, our country did forget. We forgot to hold the people in our government responsible for the security breach that made 9/11 possible. We forgot to not let ourselves be duped by those who asked us to trade our liberty for our security, while failing to guarantee even the latter. We forgot the penalty we paid when we elected a callow, intellectually incurious playboy to be our president. We even forgot to do right by the first responders by letting Congress deny them the health care they desperately needed.
As Santayana once wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” And condemned we shall be, until another terrorist attack or comparable tragedy visit us again. And maybe even then we’ll still refuse to remember.
I don’t say this with any degree of self-satisfaction or schadenfreude. I say this as someone who was in New York the day the towers fell. Who still remembers the awesome fear and loss that permeated the city that day. We were all who experienced it together convinced that things would never, could never stay the same again. Until we who managed to survive the intervening sixteen years found out that they did. In part to our great relief, but also in part to our great shame.
There are now sixteen year olds in this world — young adults — who don’t remember 9/11 or don’t remember a time before it. We have so much to teach them about that time, and not just about the simple black-and-white morality play of the evil terrorists and the good first responders. We as a country love to put a shiny coat of gloss over events like 9/11 to make them more palatable, but to do so with this particular event is to obscure the origins of their inheritance.
In reality, “never forget” became little more than a catchphrase. Not only did we “never forget,” we often actively choose not to remember. We continue to suppress the trauma of what happened to us sixteen years ago rather than come to grips with it honestly. Maybe in the final analysis we wish to forget because it’s too painful.
Hopefully someday we’ll choose to remember.
