10th Anniversary of 9/11

The 10^th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States have been (surprisingly) sober, calm, and reflective, with only minimal jingoism (and that being mostly surrounding the various sporting events, which I’m sure felt the need to tie a patriotic bow around their making millions of dollars exploiting the remembrance). What strikes me about the various TV specials and newspaper commemorations is the sense – sometimes explicitly stated – of “never forget,” that 9/11 will be forever in our national consciousness, that the ceremonies and memorials we gathered around today will be gathered around year after year, decade after decade in perpetuity. But of course that won’t be the case. We remember now because we are so close to the horrific events of that day and are still living the effects lingering from that day. The survivors and the families of the dead are still alive, as are the politicians and others of authority on that day. The memorials are fresh (and some not yet even completed). The images are from our memory, not history. But in time the images and memorials will be history, as those of us who experienced the day, directly or from an all-to-near distance (most of us now living), are gone. That’s just the nature of time, of history, of memory. On December 7^th or June 6^th, we as a nation pay little notice anymore to the memories of the attack on Pearl Harbor or the Normandy invasion, and haven’t for at least several decades. What makes us think that in 50 years, or 100 years, when most all of us are gone, September 11^th won’t be just another day in the week for most Americans (assuming there are still Americans 50 or 100 years from now). Time and history move forward, and memory fades. That’s not to lessen the import of September 11^th. But all is transient, and what seems so permanent and forever now (“never forget”) is actually only blowing along the surface of a shifting sand.

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

“Ozymandias,” Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Ground Zero Mosque"

Of course, the whole flap over an Islamic mosque in lower Manhattan (actually a cultural center with a room for prayer) is silly and wholly political (redundant?). Now that those who oppose the cultural center agree that the Muslims who want to build it have a Constitutional right to do so (kind of hard to get around this tiny matter), they are now arguing that the center shouldn’t be built near “ground zero” (where, they do not say) because it would be “insensitive” to the relatives of the victims — including the Muslim victims? — of the 9/11 attacks. But isn’t arguing against the construction of the center on the basis of “insensitivity” — the conflating of the Islam religion with the Al Qaeda terrorists — “insensitive” to the billion-plus Muslims that had nothing to do with 9/11 and have condemned the attacks? All that the opposition to the center reveals is the opponents’ intellectual and emotional (and political) inability to separate the extremist Al Qaeda from mainstream Islam. If not their bare religious and ethnic bigotry.