September 11, 2001. A day that will live in infamy. A day that we’ll never forget.
The following is something I started posting on my old WordPress after 9/11 and then successively each year (seven years later, eight, and so on.) The most recent I posted, I believe, was Twelve Years Later.
Twelve years later, and it still feels like yesterday.
The images of that morning will be forever seared into our memories.
Never has this generation seen such fear, such horror, such bravery, and such courage.
We must remember both the good and the evil from that day.
We must never forget that radical Islam attacked us on that day, and we must continue to fight the encroachment of such an evil ideology on all fronts.
We must never forget our ability as Americans to come together as we did in the hours, and days, and weeks following that September morning.
Twelve years have passed, but the memories still remain. The families who lost loved ones that day are reminded every day of that fateful day. Those of us who pause once per year cannot forget those who pause as they awaken from their beds every morning, as they see that empty place at the dinner table every evening. We must always keep them in our prayers.
I would like to end with a quote by President Bush, something that he spoke poignantly at the dedication of the remarkable memorial at the Pentagon, “On a day when buildings fell, heroes rose.” We will never forget.
Covers the sentiments of the time and I figured I would keep posting it, year after year, ad infinitum.
Remember?
”We will never forget!”
The truth of the matter is that something changed. I don’t exactly know how, nor when, but we forgot about September 11th.
Before we get into how, we can hold off on the value judgments. This might not be a bad thing. Processing a collective trauma to the point where it no longer cripples us as a society is a good thing. It shouldn’t be fresh on people’s minds – the kids who were born on that day are old enough to smoke a cigarette (not a vape!) and take up arms in the conflict we started in the wake of 9/11.
That is where the trauma re-opens, like a festering wound: there are kids fighting in Afghanistan, dying in Afghanistan, who weren’t born when the war started. That’s unprecedented in American history. Even in world history, that could only be ascribed to what, civil wars in failed states?
Who are we at civil war with? That was fought with muskets in the span of a college degree before the advent of indoor plumbing.
If we did remember 9/11, we’d remember that the AUMF was satisfied and our duty in Afghanistan was completed by Christmas in 2001. Mission accomplished and so on. Our job was not to impose alien modernity on a mountainous, tribal territory who ran as its most progressive under a westernized dictatorship a few decades ago.
Importantly, little analysis has gone into the bungling that led our government and intelligence agencies to miss the largest terrorist attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor. One intelligence office faxed the hotel some of the hijackers were at on the morning of 9/11, requesting confirmation of their stay. Another spoke to the flight school they trained at, where these men suspiciously wanted instructions on how to use the plane as a weapon during the simulation and were uninterested in learning how to safely land it. And yet another knew an embassy official in California provided a safe place to live for a couple of the hijackers before their flights.
The Millennium attacks, targeting major cities and buildings, were barely thwarted at the last minute. The World Trade Center was famously, catastrophically bombed in 1993, before Oklahoma City.
This wasn’t a surprise.
If anything, the hijackers ran behind schedule.
The collective consciousness is, of course, scarred by this incident on both a meta and micro scale.
I was in sixth grade when I saw the attacks on TV before school one morning. My teacher said “things will never be the same”. I had nightmares about them for days, ones where I was among that burning rubble that played on a TV loop.
We’re all angry and we all feel like we were left holding the bag. Those who could be blamed most easily are dead. The conditions they developed under didn’t go away. There’s a yearning for a simpler explanation, a more shadowy villain we can pinpoint and go “aha!” to satisfy the most morbid of curiosities.
We’re humiliated. Our country feels poor and vulnerable and confined, uncomfortable going to the airport, no idea who comes in, suspicious of each other. I don’t think that was the aim of the hijackers – I don’t think they were driven by Qutbian disdain for Western decadence (at least, not according to their stripper bills before the attacks) nor by some geopolitical thumb in the eye (our support for Israel and Saudi Arabia is higher than ever). If the motive of the hijackers was economic and profitable or filled with religious zeal, well, then they lost.
I think that’s all we’re left with, eighteen years later. We just want to know why. What was the reason? Who gained from this? Why go through the obvious expense and suicidal ideation without some obvious, headslapping “duh!” reward?
In absence of that, I think we’ve chosen the easiest route – to forget.
The families who lost loved ones won’t forget, and as health cases of those who inhaled the toxic air from the collapse of two giant buildings pile up, more of those families will tragically be made.
The thought when it happened was someday, someone will be born who won’t remember.
Today, we’ve reached a time where adults won’t remember.
Soon no one will.
Maybe it’s all we can ask for.
