9-11 and Remembrance
September 11, 2007Have we forgotten, as Anna Quindlen charges?
I don’t think so. Even on the most superficial level, 9-11 has become a “where were you on” day like the Challenger explosion of February 1986, President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, and for an older generation, Pearl Harbor in 1941 and VE and VJ (victory in Europe/Japan) days in 1945.
And in terms of how many Americans (and people worldwide) remember what they saw that day, the absolute numbers of those who remember are probably bigger than any of the other ‘anniversary’ days.
9-11 isn’t just a ‘media anniversary’, like two years since Katrina or 15 years since the LA Riots. Even if the media didn’t remind us, we’d remember.
But memories do fade. We saw that with the 10th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death–I remember quite well it was the summer of 1997, probably August, but I’d be hard-pressed to say what day. (August 31, 1997, for the record; I had to look it up.) And already, many challenge her legacy.
But artists are starting to make 9-11 their own, like Don DeLillo with Falling Man and Paul Greengrass’s absorbing United 93. This is an encouraging development for continuing and expanding memory, even if they run the risk of trivializing 9-11, as with the Holocaust.
The challenge is continue to honor the 9-11 dead and their families, find ways to memorialize them going forward, and learn how to say “never again” and make it mean something. One size doesn’t fit all here, and soundbites about ’sacrifice’, ‘helplessness’, ‘revenge’ and ‘justice’ don’t say much more.