Watching 9/11 Slip Through the Collective Memory.
On September 11, 2001, I was a 24 year old, second year History teacher in a stand-alone trailer teaching Civics and Economics in a small, rural high school in eastern North Carolina. The day before, I had taught about presidential succession and how the Constitution established tranference of power. One of my students asked the question: “what happens if they all die?” I was a little confused and taken aback, so I asked him to clarify the question, and he said, “you know, if the building blows up or something?” I smirked a little, thinking of the Will Smith movie Independence Day and said, “stuff like that doesn’t really happen.” Hmmmm.
The next morning on the 11th, the very student who had asked that question came into class late from a dentist appointment and announced that someone had flown a plane into a building in New York. I said it must have been some kind of freak accident. He said he didn’t think so. (To this day, that whole interaction gives me a strange feeling.) Class ended and my planning period started and I went to the Media Center where I watched the coverage with other teachers. We watched in stunned silence as the buildings collapsed. The rest of the day, my students watched the events unfold on television. I had never felt real fear about a national event before in my life, and I remember being genuinely afraid that day. I knew the world had forever changed. My students knew it, too.
In the twenty years since that day, I have continued to teach History courses in public high schools across the state. Every year, the students have become more and more removed from that day. The students I teach now were born around 2004–2006. They weren’t alive during this world-changing event. They have no personal recollection or attachment to it. When I commemorate the event yearly now, the students are disinterested with little understanding of the urgency and emotion of that day. And it isn’t their fault. What’s happening to the memory of September 11th is the same thing that has happened to all major historical events of our past. It is slipping through the collective memory. What is so deeply important to so many of us, because we lived through it, doesn’t resonate with them. Much like when I teach Pearl Harbor. December 7th is indeed a date which will live in infamy, but it’s one that is very much an afterthought unless you are one of the few old-timers who lived through the era. I used to wonder how hard it must have been for those people to see an event that defined their life time and created so much trauma to gradually pass from the collective memory. Now I know. 9/11 has been the defining national event of my life time, and I find it difficult to watch new generations casually dismiss it.
History is a living, breathing thing. We are the makers of it. But we are also made by it, as Martin Luther King, Jr. once said. The further removed we become from past events, the less impact they have on us. And that is a very sad thing, indeed. This anniversary of September 11th is particularly emotional for me with the withdrawal and collapse of Afghanistan. I grieve for the lives lost here in the United States twenty years ago. And I grieve for all of the lives lost in the wars fought in the war on terror since. Especially the thirteen soldiers who died in Afghanistan just a couple of weeks ago. May we never forget those who sacrifice for the freedoms we enjoy. And may September 11th never become simply another date on a calendar.
