Remembering For Me
I remember when I was younger and the anniversary of the assassination of JFK came about my Mom would tell me where she was on that day…and at that moment, every year. She could tell me where all her friends and family where. I always assumed it was very much the moment of their age, despite the horror and sadness it represented the end and the beginning of so much.
So it remains that September 11th for us will forever be the defining moment of our age. I remember Grant waking me up that morning with “turn on the TV, turn on the TV”, wondering how I could have missed an important re-run at 7:45. I stumbled for the remote and when I actually saw the towers burn asserted to him that it couldn’t possibly be real. It was especially surreal given that I was to fly that day. I have to confess to having become somewhat obsessed with the tragedy that day. I read the NY Times daily obituaries covering the life (however brief the paragraphs) of every September 11 victim. I cried reading them sometimes. It took months. Immense sadness at the loss and the cold reminder that human minds can conjure and enact such horrible outcomes, as again happened in Russia just last week.
I’m not a moral relativist on this matter. Nothing can bring unto another the right to take life in this way and I believe they should be rooted out, hunted and destroyed. It is telling though that as the United States convulses with a way to do just that there are fears across the spectrum of the society itself fraying apart. Caught in the straight jacket of a liberty that have served so many (regardless of bumps along the way) and the fear that causes rational people to want to preemptively strike the potentially innocent and curtail the freedom of people everywhere, especially their own.
This weekend I’m going to think about just remembering. Remembering the sadness, the horror and the many why’s and how’s. It’s odd that the TV networks just stopped playing the shocking footage of the planes hitting those buildings. We should all watch it again and again to remind us of the stakes when faced with those who can embrace such actions. I know too it’s not just defeating them militarily (something impossible) but instead staying true to the feelings that horrified us that day as a reminder of just what it is we’re fighting for. I want to live in a society where we all cry at such spectacle.
Remembering 9/11 and the visual light memorial here.