September 11 is a date that is seared in the minds of most of us living in the United States. It is difficult to comprehend that 19 years have elapsed since that fateful day. As we see the memorials crop up on social media on this date; the sights, the eeriness of the day and the many days that followed flood our memories and overwhelms our senses. Many of us will forever remember where we were when we first heard the news.
Unfortunately, it has been 19 years, this means that today’s
teenagers cannot recall the events of that day; even those who were born before
that day might not remember events clearly. The commemorations and memorials will mostly elicit
reactions from those who had lived through the day and its aftermath.
I still remember in devastating detail the events that I saw
on this day 19 years ago, as I sat with my colleagues in the cafeteria of the company
I worked for. I recall the image of the second tower blowing up, I recall the
shock that resonated with us, that this could not be happening, and yet our
doubts were dispelled immediately and emotionlessly as we saw live footages,
both on traditional and social media repeat, time and time again, the horrors
of people jumping off of the World Trade Center and their bodies tumbling
helplessly into the pavement. I recall the ash and smoke-filled skies in
Manhattan, as well as the helpless faces of those on the ground.
For most of us who were not directly affected, the memories have
inevitably become a little fuzzier with each passing year. If you are not part
the select group: people who had family members or friends who had perished; or
those who were first responders and their families, who paid with the health
and lives for their immediate fealty to their duty, the pain and horror still
remains, but for the rest of us, our recall of that day has lost much of the clarity
and sharpness. The difference between then and now is that what was once vivid mental
pictures have now become memories compressed into my mind along with so many
other memories, my recall of the events had lost the immediacy of the moment. The
shock that comes with witnessing the moment in real time had also faded.
This is not to say that the day’s events have less meaning
to us, it is just what happens with human memory.
The memorials that we have dedicated year by year in total
earnestness are pictures and monuments that we have seen before, and are static,
earnestly paying tribute to those who had passed. We use photos of the dead to
remind us of who they were, our visions of them is forever etched at that
moment in time for static eternity, the static imagery does not actively remind
us of them as they are, we have forever lost the chance to them as their active
and dynamic selves.
We seek to celebrate and honor the heroic, but heroes are humans,
not caricatures of who we think they should be, frozen in time. Heroes are not two
dimensional and monochromatic, they are three dimensional and vibrant. By emphasizing the heroic, we are neglecting the
heroes.
We are performing these rituals of remembrance to assuage
our own guilt and sadness. It is our mourning of the dead, which in a psychic
sense is necessary, for us, but how does it serve the memory of the day?
I truly have no problems with the tributes as they are now,
but deep in my mind, I keep thinking that we need to do more to make the
memories and the memorials more sustainable, more active, and we need to make the memorial more salient and
proactive.
19 years is a short time in the arc of human existence. It
would be imprudent to draw conclusions and make judgments on the meaning of our
fading memories regarding 9/11. What we can do is to say that we should not let
this memory go by ritualistically as if it was just another obligation we
needed to satisfy.
Why am I writing this right now, it is because I wondered
what we will be thinking about when we think about 9/11 20 years from now or 40
years from now? How can we actively preserve both the horrors and inspirations
of that day, that week, that month in perpetuity, as we had reflectively
avowed? How can we turn the ritualistic rut of remembrance that we comfortably
perform almost automatically into something more meaningful, more purposeful, and
more thoughtful? How can we make our observance of the anniversary less
automatic, less symbolic, less practiced, and less comfortably familiar?
The answer lies in what we have done as a collective, as a nation,
and as a society. Why does it take a
celebrity like Jon Stewart to beg congress to make the first responder
compensation fund permanent? If we are indeed grateful for their sacrifice,
this should be a no-brainer. This is but one example where the politicians
sought to politicize a monumental scar upon our collective psyche. Thankfully,
Jon Stewart called their bluff and held their feet to the fire. It took all the
potential bad publicity and potential bipartisan anger to get the present
administration to back off. The question is why? Why should it take so much effort?
Part of the answer lies in what I had mentioned before, tragedies
and deaths mean passive memorialization to us. It needs to mean active
participation in the democracy, it needs to mean active reconstruction of our
democracy as it should be practiced and executed, it needs to mean that active
civic actions are organized to pay honor to those who had perished every
September 11th in addition to the traditional memorials. It needs to
mean that we are continually bettering our society to make it worthy of their
sacrifice.
