Observations-September 11, 2020

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 11^th in addition to the traditional memorials. It needs to mean that we are continually bettering our society to make it worthy of their sacrifice.