It was the worst terrorist attack in American history, and as a result, people born after 9/11/2001 have lived their entire lives in the age of terrorism. But what does that actually mean? Remembrances of 9/11 receive less attention every year. So, did our world really change?
Before 9/11, I wrote a sample script for the Simpsons television series in which Homer accidentally stops a confused terrorist from blowing up an airplane. The script was “funny, but weird,” I was told, because “people don’t blow up airplanes.”
After 9/11, my Simpsons script was labelled “unusable” because it was “too real.” Our culture had acquired collective PTSD. We pledged to heal our physical and emotional wounds together, and to “Never forget!”
But why?
After all, we do forget. Especially the youngest among us who don’t remember the event to begin with. I wasn’t alive when Pearl Harbor was attacked, so it was hard for me to comprehend how–or even that–it had affected “my world.” But it had–every bit as much as 9/11 did.
In his book Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, historian Wilfred M. McClay says:
A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous and easily tyrannized (because) the incessant waves of daily events will occupy all our attention. Historical consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity (and), without the stories by which our memories are carried forward, we cannot say who, or what, we are.
Those who live proudly in the present often disdain the past as irrelevant. And never more than in the 21st century when their eyes and ears are constantly fixed, via portable devices, on the right now. This, McClay reminds us, is what novelist John Dos Passos rather bluntly labelled “the idiot delusion of the exceptional Now.”
The past is not irrelevant: It is the foundation (both for good and for bad) upon which our present is built. In other words, it’s a part of our story, not just “theirs.” If we don’t remember it, as George Santayana famously said, “we are doomed to repeat it.” And that…
Is why we must never forget!
Amen!
So true! Ty.
i wish I could forget but seeing the images brought back all of it this morning. I can’t believe it was 23 years ago.
Never!
‘Historical consciousness’ is tough to sustain when many apparently are determined to revise history. ~Ed.
I couldn’t agree with you more.
So true, Ed.
This can never be forgotten. For me it was something I will never forget because I knew downtown Manhattan well and I had worked a couple of blocks from the WTC for many years. At this time I was an ocean away already living in RIga, Latvia when at a neighbor’s house they called me into the living room and I looked at their TV the moment the towers fell, I fell to my knees by the TV and could hardly get up, I had seen them build the WTC in the 1970s. I ran home with a spinning head, stopped at the store for a bottle of vodka, and went home to meet up with my husband. While visiting NYC in 1999 we had gone to the top of the WTC.
💔💔💔
We will never forget🙏🏼
Amen, Mitch! And to have seen that “debate” last night makes me shudder for the fate of the future, for your country and mine.🙏🇨🇦
❤️
Very well argued. Amen to that.
You have hit the nail on the head once again😊
Amen. We never forget.
Well said. I was working on Wall Street that day. My husband was a firefighter in lower Manhattan – he was home with our 5 month old son but dropped him off with his mother to get into the city. We are both still here, thank God, but it is not something that we will easily forget.
I can certainly understand why, J.
A challenging day and an important reminder to remember. Thank you, Mitch.
I invite you to listen to the link which Nadia Bolz-Weber post today: The answering machine messages left by those in the Twin Towers chanted as Psalms
“Each year on 9-11 I commemorate the sorrow of that day by listening to this recording of Rabbi Irwin Kula chanting the messages left for loved ones by those who were in the Twin Towers.
I’ve rarely encountered anything as raw, devastating, and beautiful. I usually don’t make it through the whole thing.”
I can understand why, Steve. I’ll see if I can find it.
7-13
can you tag 7-13 4501
Thank you for this important reminder. I couldn’t agree more.
Thank you for this post and we’ll never forget.
Amen! It was a most horrible, heartbreaking, life-changing day…I will never forget! 💔
I can’t believe it’s been 23 years already. I still remember that morning turning on the news and being glued to it all day.
It’s surreal to think about the script you wrote and pitched and how prophetic it was, as with many things from the Simpsons, it seems!
My preschool has Kindness Peace and Love Day every 9/11. We focus on all the heroes and brave people who help us today, just like they did on 9/11. Today my class wrote and decorated a giant thank you letter to our firefighters. I delivered it to the fire station today. Lucky me!
Awesome, Jennie!
Thank you, Mitch!
Well said, Mitch!
Thank you, Ann.
Amen, Mitch!!!! Knowing our history is important.
I used to say that I would not want to see the time when “Patriots Day” (as it is now called) would become little more than an excuse for backyard barbecues and department store sales. It’s not even that anymore.
We said we would never forget, but most of us have.
I remember how the original trailer for the first Spider-Man movie had him catching a helicopter, I think it was, between the Twin Towers …
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