Remembering 9/11: Beyond Empty Commemoration
by Sidney Carton
Ten years ago, on the morning of Tuesday, September 11th, I was driving to work in the San Bernardino Mountains. It was one of those exceptionally beautiful mornings that those mountains are famous for. The sun was just cresting the ridges around Big Bear, and the sky was a shade of blue that painters spend their lives striving to duplicate without success. However, as I drove through this incomparable beauty, my mind was focused on my radio, where a description of incomprehensible carnage was unfolding before me. This was my introduction to the so-called “post 9/11 world.” I have few clear memories of that day. In so many ways it was exactly like the one before and the one after, I worked 10 hours that day as a carpenter, the sun was still hot and the wood was still heavy. And yet one image remains seared into my mind from that awful morning a decade ago. No, not an image of falling bodies, or the smoking gash in the North Tower, but an image of that lovely dawn, and the sense of terrible perversity that an act of such evil could occur on such a beautiful day.
That is as far as I will indulge myself, or afflict you, dear readers, with my personal reminiscences of September 11th, 2001. In comparison to the experiences of so many others, they were irrelevant and ultimately inconsequential. I lost no loved ones that day, but like so many others I felt the awful sense of hurt and horror that washed over us and hung like the acrid pall that covered New York during the days to come. I recognize the need we feel as a nation to share “our stories” from that terrible day. Much like Southern Californians in the aftermath of an earthquake suddenly have a common event on which we can all relate 9/11 is an awful touchstone of experience for every American old enough to remember it. This year in particular, we seem to have remembered it to excess.
It was bound to happen, I admit it. This was the tenth anniversary of the tragedy, providing us with an opportunity to look back, to take stock of losses, to measure progress, to “see how far we have come.” In a more cynical sense, it has provided the purveyors of the 24-hour news cycle with almost endless content , which they have run in an almost continuous loop for the past month. Yet, while I will admit that this whole spectacle was probably inescapable, it all seems sadly hollow to me. We will have the processions, the somber speeches, the presentations of wreathes, the readings of names and the obligatory vows never to forget, which frankly put are lies, for we’ve long since forgotten many of the key lessons of that day. A forgetfulness that is all-too cruelly illustrated by the many souls who rushed to the pile on those first awful days and now languish with insufficient healthcare from the illnesses brought on by their selfless acts of sacrifice amidst the poisonous ruins.
We are a forgetful nation. We are forgetful of those who selflessly gave themselves for their fellowmen in an hour of terror. We forget the sentiments of duty and love of fellow man that drove the men of the FDNY and NYPD into those burning buildings when every impulse of human nature would have had them turn in the other direction. Instead of emulating those sacrifices, we have, in our political and social discourses, spent the better part of the last few years declaring who was “undeserving” in these difficult times. I wonder whether the firefighters who charged up those stairwells even as the towers were coming down around them stopped to ask themselves if the people they were trying to help deserved it. Some how, I doubt the thought ever crossed their minds. Could the same be said of us today? Shame on us.
The attacks of September 11th, 2001 were born of hatred and were intended as a monument to death. If we truly want to hold the victims of that terrible day in remembrance we must live our lives in defiance of those values. We must live every day, seeking to love one another and take care of one another. We must embrace the devotion to our fellow men that drove those firefighters and policemen into those burning buildings “that others might live.” We must remember, in the words of one of our many national mottoes: E pluribus Unum, that while we are indeed many, we will only be great when we are one. It is only when we bear the burdens of the future together, instead of pointing fingers at one another with accusations of shirking, only when we can look across the ideological divide and see brothers and sisters instead of heretics and monsters, only when we can stand together in the face of adversity instead of disputing who should take its brunt alone, that we will be able to truly say that we remember 9/11. Until then, we deceive ourselves and mock the dead with our hollow tributes.
So tomorrow, amidst the grandiosity and spectacle of official “remembrance,” go out of your way to be kind to your neighbor, whoever they may be. In doing so you will do more to serve the legacy of those who gave their lives ten long years ago than all the monuments we could possibly hope to build.
