Today marks the 11th anniversary of the attacks on September 11th, 2001. On that day, I was a fifth grader in downtown Manhattan. I remember that day, and I remember every September 11th after that. Every year, I’m shocked by the strength of my feelings. Every year, I feel the need to say something, though it seems I don’t have anything new to add.
It still jars me to hear ‘September 11th’ being used as regular date—to mark the due date of a class assignment or an album release. To me, it should be retired and hung up on the rafters next to Patrick Ewing’s jersey in Madison Square Garden.
But I hear it used often enough to think that the rest of the world is beginning to move on. 9/11 is slipping from immediate tragedy backwards into history. In the generations to come, the bottomless pit-in-stomach feeling will be absent from the narratives of the textbooks that record it. It’s impossible to keep this feeling as fresh as it was when the towers fell, when the numbness abated, and the fires finally died out. Its potency will dilute with time, and I think that is good and normal.
This is important, because I understand now what I couldn’t before: to appreciate the irrational feelings of others that are born of their own traumas. Death happens in such magnitudes, and at what feels like such an accelerating rate, that it’s easy to become desenstized to it. HIV/AIDs claim one hundred times the causalities of 9/11 every year, globally. The recent series of mass shootings in Montreal, Virginia, Norway, and Colorado are both shocking and numbingly familiar.
It’s understandable that 9/11 isn’t as fresh in everyone’s minds as it is for most New Yorkers. But my own experience with a tragedy of such magnitude has given me a deeper insight into the pain and tragedy of others. I don’t understand, in a profound way, the feelings that compel others to mark the events of the Holocaust or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, because I instinctively, irrationally, quietly—and in my own admission, shamefully—celebrated Osama Bin Laden’s death, I can begin to approach a comprehension of the strong emotions that follow such tragedies, and the terrible acts of revenge that continue fuel more.
But that’s why, one day a year, it’s important for me to give September 11th its due. Remembrance is a human act. We do it to make sense of tragedy, to try against odds to keep history from repeating itself. It’s important to remember this event even though we will end up forgetting the feelings that make it necessary to remember: the shock, the horror, the loss that would prevent it from happening again. This is impossible, because each tragedy will lose its power for those who haven’t lived it. It will happen again, and we’ll get over it again. But it’s these shared feelings in the wake of horror that connect us across the gaps of time, location, identity.
If anything, the act of marking a date is a social signal to the victims of the next horror. That way, we at least live in a world that choses to remember.
It’s the an impossible goal that needs to persist: it’s a constant process of learning, unlearning, and relearning through the dynamic channels of history.
“What do I do?” the dust-covered ghosts asked my mother as they passed her vantage point on a broad downtown avenue that pointed directly towards the black, billowing, smoldering impossible. When in doubt, when the world has ended and you are somehow still standing, remember.
