When I finally arrived home, the only thing I cared about was holding my 10-month-old daughter. Of all the abstract flashes of memory from that day, it’s always first. There are many others, of course. Not only of the day itself, but of the weeks and months that followed.
It was a day when time stopped, beginning a year that would never end. Through the passage of time, all of those disparate memories have coalesced into a solitary emotion, one that no single word will ever describe.
And how could it?
You cannot apply a standard definition to the most emotionally fraught and life shaping period of one’s life. It was a solitary year that bifurcated my existence into two distinct parts – before and after. I entered that time one person, and I left it someone else. For better or worse, I can’t really be sure. Others may have a more definitive view.
Yet, as we stumble our way into another September, I can already sense the feeling of dread, it grows in anticipation of our annual season of ‘Never Forget’. It’s nearly here.
The first several years ‘Never Forget’ was a clarion call, fueled by anger, on a quest for vengeance. To me, it meant retribution for what had been done to my city and my people. It also meant vindication for what we were doing to them and theirs. It was primal and unabashedly ugly.
I didn’t care. ‘Never Forget’ felt good. It gave me comfort.
But as all things must pass, so did my interpretation of ‘Never Forget’. It was no longer a call to arms. Those directly responsible eventually had been dealt with. After a decade, the term began to meander in meaning. It became a platitude in search of purpose.
Surely, we would never forget the victims, nor the heroic acts of that time. They are preserved and well-documented. And rightfully so.
Anyone who was alive will always remember those things.
And those that weren’t, will not.
History tells us that is how it goes. Do you remember the Alamo? No, we no longer need to parrot a catch-phrase for that September, just as we don’t need nomenclature for any personal tragedy experienced through less spectacular circumstances.
We mourned before. We mourned after. We mourn today. We will mourn tomorrow. The past 20 years, and especially the last 18 months, exemplify the non-discriminatory nature of misery.
It spares no one. It is relentless.
About ten years ago I began to look at Septembers with a sense of bewilderment, and a few years soon after, with indignation. At the forefront was a once poignant remembrance at Ground Zero, that metastasized into a macabre ceremony of public self-flagellation.
Reciting the names of the dead. The same readings and prayers, made by the usual cast of characters. Dramatic gongs marking the exact times of each impact and each collapse…If the purpose of this annual spectacle was to perpetually relive the horror and aftermath of that day, the trauma visible on the faces of family still participating served as evidence of its accomplishment.
How can you forget something you stubbornly insist on reliving? Who is this meant to help?
Yet ‘Never Forget’ persisted. It was already embedded in the American psyche, now a patriotic social media obligation – enthusiastically shared with photos of the twin towers – usually ornamented with a red, white and blue ribbon. Some included eagles, flags and sunsets. Some of the visual tributes have all of those things and more. The creativity of such virtue signaling is only limited by one’s star-spangled imagination.
I know this because, for a long time, I played along too.
* * *
Now, if ‘Never Forget’ won’t fade away, I wish the directive would become more specific. At this point, what is it exactly that I am not supposed to forget?
Is it the graphic images? The disbelief? The anxiety? The anger? The despair? The fear?
Are we just talking about the Top 40-type mainstream shared memories? I won’t recount them. You know the lyrics. You’ve seen the documentaries. If you want to brush up, you can check your local listings this week. All the go-to favorites will be televised.
Or perhaps it’s the more obscure indy-band ‘deep cuts’ that we are not supposed to forget? You know, the memories that are usually unplugged, introspective and understated. Sort of like The Shins before Garden State.
Well, there was the weekend after it happened. We went up to stay with friends in Connecticut just to get a break from New York. Us asking if we could retreat there in case the next attack was a dirty bomb. Them telling us they were expecting their first-born child. Me visibly dismayed at the thought of bringing an innocent into this new found state of catastrophe. Talk about awkward.
Or there was the time I screamed at my wife for letting the baby touch the newly delivered mail. Why? I was paranoid it might contain traces of Anthrax. Do you remember when people were stock piling Cipro? I do.
I’ll also never forget the day outside my office when a metal object was thrown out of the window of a passing car. It landed with a clang onto the side walk and scattered pedestrians who looked to take cover. But praise be, no boom. That incident was far more interesting than the countless building evacuations due to bomb threats. Remember those?
Of course, who could forget the individuals we all knew who would cringe at the sight of an airplane overhead or incredulously refused to fly anywhere for years after? That irrational fear has only recently been surpassed by vaccinated people who still wear surgical masks outside.
But I digress.
Then there was my own personal and solemn contemplation of what happened in September, which led to a moment that October when I admitted to myself that I no longer believed in God. After all, how could He let this happen? He was either a sadistic prick or He did not exist.
I settled on the later.
The loss I felt in that moment of clarity unnerved me profoundly. It shattered every belief I held my entire life up to that point. That revelation still depresses me today.
So, in the last desperate spasms of ‘Never Forget’ I imagine some will say its current value may be found in how the nation united after the attacks. How we Americans put aside our differences and came together as one.
It’s a very nice thought, but it’s kumbaya bullshit. That mystic chord of memory swelled for maybe a month. And it was cold consolation considering all that was happening – everywhere and with everyone.
Regardless, the better angels of our nature have not been seen since.
* * *
The hard truth is that after 20 years of never forgetting, it has become painfully apparent:
We remember everything, except who we were before 9/11.
Is it just coincidence that Rip Van Winkle slept exactly as long? He awoke from his slumber in a New York he did not recognize. Somehow, in the same precise time span, we’ve managed to experience a bizarro opposite outcome.
After two decades, we no longer recognize ourselves.
When I held my daughter that September evening 20 years ago, I know that same scene played out all across the country. It was part of shared experience, revealing to us what truly mattered. We swore to protect them and do our best to make the world a better place for them to grow and fulfill their dreams. As dark as it might have been in those days, we knew we had an obligation to those children.
And yet we failed them.
That so much was made clear last week. I have no doubt that David Espinoza, Jared Schmitz, Rylee McCollum, Dylan Merola, and Kareem Nikoui were held close that night in September by loving parents. Like me, I’m sure their parents worried about the future and the world their babies would inherit. Like my daughter, on that night, they were all still shy of their first birthday.
Those infants were just five of the fallen 13 American service members who were senselessly slaughtered by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan. I weep just typing that sentence.
The fact that these American babies and toddlers of 2001 were the last sacrifices made upon the altar of Afghanistan makes me ashamed of this country on a level I never thought possible.
Unfortunately, those directly responsible refuse to hold themselves accountable. Not for the calamity this nation unleashed this summer nor for the twenty years before it. We just transitioned from a president who was embarrassing, to another who has completely humiliated us. Both seemingly never at fault, congratulating their own failures. Of course, the two previous administrations and their masters of war are more culpable as thousands of our soldiers and countless civilians were left to die in places we had no business being.
So much blame to go around, and no one willing to take it.
* * *
How many years have we spent distracted and enraged by things that don’t actually matter? We may not have run out of problems, but we sure act as if we did. When ‘who can pee where’ and ‘how cakes are decorated’ became important political flashpoints, we lost the plot.
While we have been looking down at our phones – high-tech navel-gazing – we have been divided and conquered by a ruling class that has no regard or respect for any of us. Unelected bureaucrats empowered by elected incompetents are now our masters. We deserve them. All of them.
One by one, year by year, first in the name of safety, and recently in the name of health, we willingly have given away our freedoms to institutions we mistrust and can’t hold accountable.
Is it any surprise we find ourselves accepting a reality that slips deeper into a world warned of by Orwell and Huxley and described by Philip K. Dick? We believe nothing and trust no one, yet have effectively allowed a technocracy to replace our republic.
Public discourse is dead. Everyone is afraid to say what they actually think because if they are not de-platformed by the tech oligarchy, they may risk cancellation by a nameless, faceless digital mob. They wield incredible power because few are brave enough to stand up to them.
Is it not terrifying that someone can lose their livelihood for the sin of being human? Or just young and stupid?
Make no mistake, today we are ruled by fear. Better to just keep your head down and mouth shut. It’s the inevitable outcome for a society that has fully-embraced a culture of victimization.
We’ve completely lost our nerve.
Today we stand a fragile and spoiled people quick to cancel school because it might snow tomorrow. We are cowards for letting children struggle to breathe because of a virus we know won’t harm them. We are weak because we hate the people we disagree with and are offended by everything they say.
But most of all, we are sheep for letting it all happen.
Is it just coincidence that this shift in mindset began with those terrorist attacks on the homeland 20 years ago? Isn’t that really the legacy of ‘Never Forget”? To never forget being afraid?
America was no utopia before 9/11, but it was a far better place than it is today.
A lot of damage has been done over the past two decades, and much of it may be irreparable. I‘m not sure if it’s too late to course correct, but I do know I’m not going to live in fear any longer.
It’s time to forget 9/11 and the path it has taken us. Rather, let’s remember and redeem the brave, resilient people we were before that September.
This piece also appears in the author’s substack newsletter Sailing to Byzantium.
The author’s bio includes a reference to Stoicism, which would be a pretty useful thing for America overall to get to know and embrace.
The basic premise of course is that we can’t prevent calamity from befalling us, but we can always control our reaction to it.
Our reaction to 9-11 didn’t need to unfold the way it did. We could have made different choices, better choices and made ourselves into a better nation and people.
Because other nations have. Every nation and people have suffered attacks and violence that dwarf 9-11 and yet often they manage to struggle through it and improve.Report
Maybe we should be more like those nations. What do those nations have in common? Like, maybe we could emulate some of those traits.Report
They have stoicism in common. You know, because they read Marcus Aurelius.Report
Probably want to nudge people away from philosophies that could be described as anti-stoic, as well.Report
“The author’s bio includes a reference to Stoicism, which would be a pretty useful thing for America overall to get to know and embrace.”
I’m Stoicism-curious but never got around to the filling out the proper paperwork.Report
Well, you will just miss out on the complimentary welcoming gift.
Which is, of course, a cold cup of leftover coffee for which you will feel grateful.Report
Hey, beats the nihilist welcome gift of a bottomless tote bag.
That isn’t a metaphor, it was literally a tote bag with no bottom in it.Report
When I was a kid my parents had a “Best of Punch Cartoons” book on the shelf. My favorite was always the minimalist one with what looked like a counter from a big department store, with a matronly sort of lady in front, a properly-dressed Brit behind who was clearly pressing to make the sale, a sign hung on the wall that said “For the Man Who Has Everything,” and a huge shapeless mass on the counter with what turned out to be a pair of u-shaped handles. The caption was, “It’s a bloody great bag to keep it all in!”
Must be some branch of philosophy that fits that.Report
And if you gaze for long into the tote bag, the tote bag also gazes into you.Report
Well, the sidewalk does, at any rate…Report
Chip, you win ‘Comment of the Day’. Phenomenal.Report
I’m not sure that mass stoicism is possible. Individual stoicism to any given personal or impersonal calamity that hits you his possible but different people are going to have different breaking points. Having mass stoicism occur in any large seized population seems to require humans to be what they are not.Report
I saw the title of the article and assumed it was about the Holocaust.
I don’t much care about the ritual of never forgetting. The important thing to me is that we actually don’t forget those who suffered and died that day. That’s not about vengeance or security; it’s about humanity. We should learn lessons from everything and not forget those lessons, but that’s something different.Report
It’s interesting… many people associate “Never Forget” with the Holocaust but the phrase most closely associated with the Holocaust (and other genocides) is “Never Again”.Report
Some corner of my brain says that both phrases were common.Report
“Never Forget” holocaust
7.6 million Google hits
“Never Again” holocaust
6.8 million Google hits
I was nodding along with Kazzy, so that surprises me.Report
“Never Regret” Holocaust
9.8 million Google hits
Oh my.Report
The lesson to learn from 911 is there are evil people on the planet who engage in mass murder because they oppose everything we are.
They used airplanes because they didn’t have nukes.
We can’t make peace with them. We were mostly ignoring them at that time. We treated them as criminals, let them commit the occasional terrorism and then arrested any survivors.
They used airplanes because they didn’t have nukes.
Holding up a dozen people killed in a suicide bomb in another country is fine, but claiming we’d be left alone if only we had the same policies we had before 911 is not.
They used airplanes because they didn’t have nukes.
They’re still around. A few years ago they almost founded a country in the Middle East. A sub-section of the world’s population finds their ideas and ideals attractive.
They used airplanes because they didn’t have nukes.
Getting nukes has gotten easier since the 1950’s. All you really need is a country and enough time. We can’t afford to give them that.Report
And now they can’t use airplanes any more and can’t get nukes.Report
Unfortunately that will require ongoing effort.
Even more unfortunately, part of that effort now requires the Taliban to keep their word.
It also requires a certain amount of stability and common sense from Pakistan.Report
Probably.
Probably not. There’s no end of poorly governed central Asian wasteland that lacks an American presence and has been for decades and it made not a wit of difference for terror threats.
I suppose stability and common sense helps but it’s not necessary unless you’re talking about Pakistan selling nukes which, not even they seem dumb enough to do.Report
I worry less about them selling nukes as I do about them ‘losing’ nukes. But, of course, I worry the same thing about Russia, and aside from spy thrillers, we haven’t had any real trouble with that.Report
Yeah I feel like, for those countries that’re in the nuclear club, securing their nuclear weapons is a big element of the prestige of owning them. Like, ok, you have cronies and corrupt douchebags riddling your government like lice on a dead cat but A: you put people who’re at least generally competent and reliable in charge of securing your nukes; B: those people have no illusions about how readily they’ll be shot if their charges go missing and C: everyone knows that there is no such thing as an anonymous nuclear weapon. Soon as the sucker is found or exploded the scientists will trace that baby home without fail.
So if you’re guarding a given nations nukes you’re a person who’s pretty rational and trusted by the regime, you know if you lose a nuke it’ll end up traced back to you and you know that you and likely your entire family is going to end up buried head down in a grave if that happens.Report
The elements that could really kick that line of reasoning are, 1: The country falling apart. 2: A group of people who expect to be rewarded after they die.
For example when the USSR fell multiple nations ended up with nukes. Russia kept it’s and the Ukraine traded them for a peace deal. Those are both fine options. If Pakistan falls, who gets the nukes?Report
Clearly whatever the Pakistani successor state ends up being which would, in this scenario, presumably some theocratic regime? Seems far fetched to me though, Islamism’s popularity in the masses has been waning for decades now and Pakistan is a wildly corrupt shambolic democracy, not a shoe string dictatorship.Report
As far as I can tell the Taliban aren’t popular either, much less ISIS.
Further, assume instead of a “Pakistani successor state” we get a multitude of warlords and/or a vast failed state.Report
They don’t have to be “popular”.
They just have to be more popular than the Americans were.Report
Which illustrates the problem.
How does America safeguard our security in the face of events such as a hypothetical collapse of nations like Pakistan? Or Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or for that matter, Canada?
The argument put forward by the proponents of the occupation would compel us to invade and occupy indefinitely.
What they never were able to articulate was either an outer boundary to their logic, or some alternative strategy to safeguard our interests.
It was always a hammer in search of new nails.Report
If you are claiming other people’s logic suggests we need to invade Canada, then you’re probably presenting a stawman.Report
But only Canada?
The logic holds true for all the rest?Report
It would be trivial to make a list of nuclear powers.
It would also be trivial to make a list of countries that are in danger of failed states, or rather see how likely that seems.
It would be remarkably stupid to not prepare for a failed nuclear state (NK and Pak are the most likely).
What “prepare” means is going to depend on which state. I HOPE we have contingencies for making sure nukes don’t fall into terrorist hands in that situation which don’t amount to prayer.
We have decided that we’re going to trust the Taliban and go back to our pre-911 policy of looking the other way to what they do.
So, what do you suggest we do if they go back to supporting ISIS? What do you suggest we do if they also start researching WMDs? What do you suggest we do if they do both of those things?
Going back will be more expensive than just staying there. If our choices are between re-invading or living with a nuclear ISIS, then I expect we’ll go back.
Real life is messy so I doubt the choice will be that clear cut.Report
You mean, what if Pakistan goes back to selling nuclear secrets and supporting radical Islamic terrorists?
Good question.Report
Let’s talk for a minute about what kinds of nukes are concerning?
Dirty bombs? Always a concern, because you can slap those together in a cave.
Suitcase nukes? TTBOMK, very few, if any, exist, and the yield would be very low. Still wouldn’t want one going off in my neighborhood, but seeing as how we’ve yet to have one go off in anyone’s neighborhood, they remain fodder for spy thrillers.
Nuclear warheads? The kind you find on missiles. Be it a cruise missile or an ICBM, or a bomb. The thing about such warheads is that you can not simply remove the warhead, pack it into the back of a truck, and detonate it. Warheads don’t work like that. At best, you turned a warhead into a dirty bomb, if you are lucky. No country wants their warheads going off prematurely, so they are engineered not to. And bypassing that engineering is not something a grad student is going to manage in a cave.
Honestly, I’d worry less about nukes, and more about chem or bio weapons, since those can be cooked up in a cave.Report
Personally, the “dirty bomb” fear got played out for me with Jose Padilla.Report
It would be a mess if such a thing happened. It also seems extremely unlikely. Pakistan has a formidable external enemy: India that they have been culturally and politically at odds with since the nations inception. It is culturally unlikely the country would just dissolve into a grab bag of fighting warlords. Pakistans culture and the interests of the US and India and China all push against such an outcome. Nobody anywhere inside or out of Pakistan would want a nuclear armed anarchy where Pakistan is now.Report
North Korea being a nuclear lunatic is hardly in anyone’s best interest right now. Maybe with the exception of Gaza, I’m not sure any of our failed states are in someone’s interest.Report
North Korea, though, doesn’t meet your definitions of chaotic fractured failed states though. It’s an insular tyrannical nightmare kingdom but it’s proven stable so far. It’s also, frankly, somewhat of a historical accident and a hold over from the cold war.Report
When I check lists of potential failed states, i.e. states liking to fall apart, NK has a lot more of the hallmarks than Pakistan.
Now I don’t understand the yardsticks they’re using so I don’t know how much of this is reasonable.
They are not currently a failed state. Whether they’re one famine or insanity away from becoming one is outside of my skill set.Report