Everywhere today we are told not to forget. As though we could. Living in the shadow of the Manhattan skyline, I paused and thought today while on a rooftop garage. The Empire State building peered at me from across the river, and I thought to myself: “That skyline is short two buildings.”
I was a senior in high school when the whispers began. A warm, and unreasonably sunny Tuesday morning. People said something about a plane hitting the World Trade Center, and everyone, of course, assumed it was an accident. Until the second plane hit.
Then there was fear, confusion. A gaggle of privileged young things attempting to reach their parents who worked in the city. Tears and fears. Huddled groups, drawing each other close as though bodily warmth would amount to safety and sanity.
This was the effect it had on teenagers. Near adults.
Now, I sit, and I think of those who were children. The ones who were so young, who never got to taste the life of 1980’s and 1990’s security. Who perhaps never got to feel safe. They might have been confused at the time, but a milestone had been reached. We had been attacked, on our home soil.
Then there are the children born after. Born into a whirling world of uncertainty, raised in the shadow of a dark event on a sunny day. Raised with no knowledge of peace. No sense of what used to be right and decent.
The consequences have been enormous. Ten years of warfare, a burgeoning military, the collapse of economy and the rise of a clumsy modern empire. And the footage, burned into all of our heads. Planes silently gliding into steel structures as the amateur videographers gasp.
I never had a strong sense of what it was to be American, and still don’t. We lack an identity, as a young and complex nation. People use 9/11 to galvanize, to unite. With Us or Against Us. Simple divisions and definitions. Someone on the radio today actually said “Never forgotten, and never forgiven.”
What an awful attitude.
Is that what we are to be, a reactionary nation of the vengeful? The bitter mass of anger that wanted so desperately to lash out at our attackers, to destroy an enemy we couldn’t find?
I hope not.
Today I don’t just remember buildings falling, or the wars that ensued, or even the fact that a group of people found this country (or at least some of its qualities) so repugnant that they would do such a thing.
I remember the lives changed. The lives ended. And the lives that never had a chance to relax in the hazy, ill-remembered days before the event itself.
We’ve all lost something, whether it’s a person, a sense of security, or even just the blessed ignorance of being attacked.
That is what we should remember. That is what I felt today, as I stood looking through haze and a mist of rain at the iconic silhouette of Manhattan. I felt loss, and for a moment, I felt as though I was lost.
I hope we can find our way back to peace and happiness. I hope that we can forgive. Not necessarily the individuals involved, for they are beyond forgiveness, but certainly forgiving the world for being a hostile place. Forgiving society for being an ugly thing at times. And forgiving ourselves for our reactions, for our violence rooted in fear. Telling us never to forget seems to me to get in the way of that. Today I remember. Tomorrow I’ll live my life. But each time I see the skyline of the city, I’ll still think: two are missing. Two are lost.
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