You can still see the “never forget” decals on cars driving along the highway. “Never forget,” often set in a larger graphic showing a ghostly image of the World Trade Center, or an American flag.
“Never forget” is an angry slogan, an order that we keep the horrible events of Sept. 11, 2001, present in our minds, to keep the anger and pain a part of our daily lives. The world changed that day, they say, but to understand how we must admit some very painful truths to ourselves, truths that we have long suppressed.
I’m not talking about the various entanglements in the Middle East and elsewhere that helped set the stage for what happened. Whatever our role in the world had been, has been and continues to be, the killing of innocent workers and the incineration of buildings is unjustified.
What we need to admit is that the attacks remain an open and festering wound on our collective American psyche and that our continued obsession with that day is just not healthy for us as a nation. We have failed to move through the grieving process, remain mired in an anger and fear and suspicion.
The Mayo Clinic calls it “complicated grief”:
For some people, though, this normal grief reaction becomes much more complicated, painful and debilitating, or what’s known as complicated grief. In complicated grief, painful emotions are so long lasting and severe that you have trouble accepting the death and resuming your own life.
Or, in this case, the life of the nation.
Consider these comments, from a conservative commentator. He is writing in response — a year after the fact — to comments made by Garrison Keillor about what Keillor called the “odd way that we have with dealing with a disaster.” Keillor was making the point that by wading in the horrors of that day, by refusing to move ahead, we make it impossible to return to some semblance of normalcy. The issue, according to Keillor, is obsession.
That, Aaron Goldstein says, is disrespectful:
I must put my foot down when he chastises Americans for wanting to remember those who died on September 11th. No need for him to take out his contempt on the rest of us. Still, one might ask why I am so bothered by Keillor’s point of view. After all, he is just another spoiled, self-indulgent half wit who lives in no small part on the largesse of the American taxpayer. So why pay him any heed at all?
I pay his words heed because their sentiment is similar to that of those who chide people for remembering the Holocaust. For as long as I can remember, I have come across sorts who demand to know why we are still mourning the deaths of six million Jews. “That happened a long time ago. Get over it. Move on,” are typical of the sort of sentiments I have encountered over the years from that school of thought. Honestly, I have never understood why some people get so worked up over remembrance of those who perished in the Holocaust. Do they simply dislike Jews and believe they had what was coming to them but will not say so in polite society? Or do they think that Holocaust remembrance puts Israel in a good light in the way that remembrance of September 11th puts President Bush in a good light? Or is it as simple as the belief these people simply aren’t worth giving a moment’s thought?
If Keillor’s contempt for President Bush is so strong that he cannot bring himself to remember those who died on September 11th then I pity him. If Keillor thinks those who died on September 11th simply aren’t worth the time or trouble of a moment of silence then he has my contempt. I and millions of Americans will remember those who died at the hands of al Qaeda terrorists on September 11, 2001. We will do so with or without the likes of Garrison Keillor.
I think Goldstein misses the point. The issue is not remembrance, but obsession. It is about finding a healthy way to grieve and to continue living, to get past the pain and anger that paralyzes us and leads us down the dark road of retribution.
I think remembrance ceremonies can be useful, even necessary — like the “Mourner’s Kaddish,” in which “there is no reference, no word even, about death., as the Orthodox Union points out:
The theme of Kaddish is, rather, the Greatness of G-d, Who conducts the entire universe, and especially his most favored creature, each individual human being, with careful supervision. In this prayer, we also pray for peace – from apparently the only One Who can guarantee it – peace between nations, peace between individuals, and peace of mind.
Paradoxically, this is, in fact, the only true comfort in the case of the loss of a loved one. That is, to be able to view the passing of the beloved individual from the perspective that that person’s soul was gathered in, so to speak, by the One Who had provided it in the first place.
The Kaddish reminds us of the temporary nature of life and is offered regularly for the first year and then annually on the anniversary of the death. It is a paean to god and to peace designed to help the living live.
The reading of the names at the memorials comes from this tradition. The other, darker aspects of our 9/11 obsession, however, come from somewhere else, from fear and anger and a desire for revenge that are easily co-opted by the political classes.
Consider the video presented by the Republicans during their national convention last week, a video that replayed some of the more gruesome moments of that horrible day — Keith Olbermann rightly called it a “sociological pornography… a virtual snuff film.” The video was not about commemoration, about remembering the dead; it was about stoking the flames of fear and anger once again to gain political advantage. It is the same script the GOP used in 2004 and they are hoping to use in 2008.
Unfortunately, Olbermann’s outrage, while justified, was built on the same foundation, on the mythologizing of what he called “our most solemn day.” That raises several questions: Why most solemn? What about the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and drew us into World War II? Or the day we fled Vietnam? Or the opening shots of the Civil War? Or the assassination of John F. Kennedy (there are similarities between this one and 9/11)?
To go back to the Goldstein piece, I find it interesting that he brings up the Holocaust because there are some minor parallels between our national collective inability to resume our lives and the inability of the Germans pre-WWII to rise about the resentments and victimhood caused by their defeat during World War I.
The thirst of Germany’s resentments were quenched by scapegoating Jews and others — gays, communists, gypsies — and flexing its military muscles, relying on a brutal nationalistic ideology of Arian purity to rally the nation.
We, of course, are not Weimar. But watching the Republican Convention and the various speakers’ aggressive us-against-them rhetoric and the reflexive “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” chants, I couldn’t help but wonder about our own fascist tendencies.
Sept. 11, 2001, was a truly horrible day and many lives were lost. In now way is this blog post meant to diminish what the families and friends of the victims are feeling, their loss, their sorrow. That is permanent. but as a nation, we need to find a way
to move forward from the politics of ignorance and fear to something more appropriate to a functional nation seeking to make its place in the world of the 21st century.
Basically, we need to grieve and live.
