9/11: Never Forget

It's hard to believe it has been eight years now since that morning when, as I was settling in at my office (a few blocks from the Hudson River about 140 miles north of NYC) I noticed the sound of a jet aircraft that was much louder than the normal, inbound to ALB, traffic I would often hear. This was followed by an early conference call that usually had extensive Q&A but ended after just one question besides my own, and then hearing about what sounded like just another bad day for general aviation ("an inexperienced pilot ran into a building, no doubt"). Fast forward a few hours to me stopping at a church I had been getting out of the habit of visiting and then not only praying out loud (so not like me!) but then hearing later from some co-workers about how it ending up on local TV! And then a couple of days later, completely losing my temper, something that has only happened once or so a decade (at work anyway) over what in hindsight was a mere slight inflicted by the buffoon then masquerading as our Director of Research. (It was as if the rage stirred up in me by the 9/11 attack had pushed things up to within about a half a degree of the the boiling point, and one dumb-ass little memo was all it took to unleash Berserker.) 

Time heals wounds, but not completely, it would seem. We can forgive, if grace is a part of who we are, and sometimes forget, but sometimes not. There is a concern out there that We the People are starting to forget what was made plain on that dreadful day. This was certainly helped along by the semantic mischief of recent months whereby the "War of Terror" was banished from official discussion, as if a millennial struggle had in a couple of years gone from white hot to stone cold. There is indeed a current within our vast and variegated culture that would like to Move On, to revel in fatuous utopian notions and transform this day into some kind of flower planting, mural painting inter-generational Amerikorps, but its not very wide and not very deep. For most of us, the visual horror, those amazing pictures of impact,collapse and humans astride the threshold of doom, reach through the windows of our souls and strike places that were rendered permanently tender. If, in the years just ahead, we are somehow visited with another terroristic attack, the pain of brushing up against this wound on our collective soul will swiftly transmute into outrage. 

9/11/01 is memorable not only because of the horrific attack and the heroism of that day but also because of it briefly transported us out of the stultifying bubble we had assumed was reality. We learned much to our delight, that ennui, that postmodern "whatever", had not gotten the better of us after all. It had been tempting to suppose that following the trajectory of every civilization that had preceded us, we as a people had reached a point of irreversible diminishment, too comfortable and self-satisfied to stand up and fight, if necessary. For a moment (actually, a few months, and then the numbness of affluenza reasserted itself) it was palpably evident that rumors of our demise had been greatly exaggerated. There is something much more resilient in our national character than we are normally able to recognize. We saw it eight years ago. We see it in the way the economy is stirring back to life after the global financial panic of a lifetime, and have seen it in the way a lot of citizens responded to the overreaching of Powers-that-be of the moment on the matter of dramatically tampering with the delivery of health care. This sacred day still brings a pain to my heart and a glisten to my eye when I let some of the photographs transport me back, but it also reminds me that virtue lurks beneath the surface of our national persona, well cloaked by the banalities of what passes for popular culture, but alive and capable of vigor nonetheless.