Souvenirs

Accosted by the unrelenting coverage of this fifth Anniversary, I debated whether to think about the Attack or to take a break from It. After all, It has come to dominiate nearly everything in the news nearly every day since then, so perhaps for one day, it would be good to have a rest. "Perhaps," I reasoned, "that is the best way to commemorate September 11: simply by resting, and taking one day per annum on which hijacked planes, collapsing towers, terrorism, Islamism, the Middle East, the war in Iraq, WMDs, IEDs, oil, and everything that has slowly become confused and amalgamated with '9/11' needn't be thrust to the forefront of our minds."

I found it ironic that in attempting to justify my mental holiday from 9/11, I was forced to give it so much more thought than normal. Just when I thought that I was out, they pull me back in. And maybe that's simply another way that the Attack has come to dominate me and other Americans: we cannot be satisfied with remembering the dead; we cannot be satisfied to be left with the grief, and the outrage, and the revulsion precipitated from the events of that Day. Born along with those emotional responses—or, perhaps born from them—was a compulsion to dissect the way the Attacks changed the world, changed our country, changed our lives.

And I think our national obsession with September 11 invites us, on this day more appropriately than on any other, to consider whether it is healthy to have our psyches so ruled by one single day. For the whole of last week, KCPP did an entire series devoted to such topics: How did 9/11 change Americans perceptions of Islam? How did it change our interactions with Muslims? How did it affect teens? How does it affect young children? How has it affected education? How has it affected the justice system? How has it affected our national security? How has it affected popular culture? How has it affected comedy? Maybe it's just too much introspection too soon.

As usual, I was rendered completely ambivalent by two warring factions within my own mind. On the one hand, I do feel that we, as a nation, are in desperate need of a September 11 holiday; on the other, I also recognize the need to honor the memory of those murdered on that day, to contemplate the causes of the Attacks, to consider how to make our homeland and the world (more generally) safer and more free, and to use the event as a milestone against which we can evaluate personal, national, and global growth since that day.

If I may be said to have reached a conclusion from my deliberations, it was that it is altogether fitting and proper for a contemplative mood to predominate each September 11 and the days leading up to it. A "9/11 holiday" on which we, for 24 hours, deliberately assume a national amnesia of what transpired five years ago today would smack of sacrilege to many, in as much as it denies that real people were killed in a barbaric way, and of juvenile denial to all, in as much as we would be hoping to alter the past by pretending it never happened. [As an aside: how completely ridiculous are the Iranian refutation of the Holocaust, and the Japanese disavowel of their war crimes during World War II? Talk about smacking of sacrilege and juvenile denial!] Besides being silly, avoiding the truth about the Attacks would simply be impossible. Not unlike a family reunion in which Aunt Sylvia's husband is noticably absent: everyone knows she had an affair and he left her, and everyone is thinking about it when they see her, but no one will mention it, so all must share the embarrassment in unacknowledging silence. I don't want the Attack to feel like a dirty family secret we can't or won't discuss, even for one day, because that just gives It more power over us, the power to supress our memories and voices.

So what shall we say then? Shall we forget on all other days so that memory will abound once a year? God forbid! Unfortunately, the reality of September 11 and the ways that it indelibly altered life can be neither escaped nor ignored, and perhaps this is the most inconvenient truth about the situation. We must bear the memory and the consequences, notably the percipitous militarization of our nation (Orange and Red alert levels, the deployment of friends and family to distant lands, the rising cost of energy, a burgeoning national deficit, and recently, restrictions on liquids aboard aircraft). The great legacy of the Attack is the way that it changed the American paradigm: we are no longer protected by the seas on both coasts, and hence, are locked into a perpetual state of vigilance. [See how easilly I have lapsed into this digression, catalized by the "compulsion to dissect the way the Attacks changed the world, changed our country, changed our lives."]

Maybe next year at this time, instead of such a languid, cerebral investigation of whether and how to think about September 11 and what it means, I can explore how I feel about it, how my friends feel about it, and how it has affected our day-to-day lives.