I teach at a Community College– mostly introductory classes, so the majority of my students are young enough that 9/11 is either something they weren’t alive for, or something that they only dimly remember, without having understood the event at the time.
I’m continually having to remind myself that they have no idea how different the world was before that day, or just how profoundly traumatized everybody–not just in NYC or DC, but everywhere–was.
My parents compared it to the day JFK was assassinated, my grandparents to Pearl Harbor–a day that you always remember exactly where you were and what you were doing. There is now an entire generation with no memory of that trauma, and I’ve seen it slowly fade from their collective consciousness over my years of teaching. When I started in 2013, it was one of their earliest memories–they would have been five or six in 2001– but now it’s something incoming freshman only know from history books. It means as much to them as those prior national traumas do to me, possibly less. I say less because I remember 9/11 and can draw on that to relate. They have no such great tragedy to call upon for empathy–whether this is because tragedies and loss of life have sadly become far more commonplace and therefore less traumatic for those not directly involved, or because something on the same scale hasn’t occurred in their lifetimes, I can’t say.
My point, I suppose, is that it can be difficult to truly understand or appreciate the deep scars something like 9/11 leaves on us–as individuals (directly affected or not), as a nation, and as a world– when your entire life has happened after the event itself. We tell ourselves we’re “over it,” that we’ve “healed” and “moved on” but we haven’t. We never really will, not in my lifetime, anyway.
I recall having an insight in the middle of a poetry workshop during grad school–somebody had referenced the Zapruder tape, and it occurred to me that having that event recorded and played over and over again just re-traumatized everybody who lived through it. The availability of that footage feeds paranoia and conspiracy-theories that surround the event. 9/11 is similar. We all sat there, glued to our televisions watching the impact, the smoke, the explosions, the collapse… again, and again, and again for months, and then having the trauma revisited every single year since. The conspiracies are there, too. People who refuse to accept the official answer, looking for something more that helps make sense of something that doesn’t.
As a nation–and a world, we’re still living with that trauma, and it goes deep. Twenty years sounds–and feels–like a long time, but it isn’t. All decisions that have been made at a national level have been in the context of 9/11. It influenced everything from how we voted to how we viewed human rights–our own and everybody else’s–and as a consequence we’ve been at war basically ever since. We are now at the end of that war, and if what I’m hearing from other citizens at all levels is to be believed, we are all deeply unsure what to make of that fact or where we go from here.I don’t have answers. I don’t think anyone does. And I don’t think anyone has had any real answers for how to deal with the trauma of that day for twenty years.
Elisabeth Kubler Ross famously laid out the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Most people move through them eventually. But a nation is not a person. While we can expect to still be sad and feel the loss of a loved one twenty years later–often just as profoundly as the day they died–we learn to live with it. We, as a country, have not gotten there yet. It takes time, and a nation moves and grows on an much larger time-scale than any one individual. I can’t say I know where we are as a country on Dr. Kubler Ross’ scale–plenty of us are still angry, a lot of us are depressed, some are still in denial–but we need to take the opportunity presented now to look inward for answers. We know who did this, we know who was to blame, we have pointed plenty of fingers and punished many people–not all of them deservedly–for it.
Introspection has never been America’s strong suit, and we continue to struggle with the sins of our past–the mere existence of the BLM movement is proof of that–but we need it now. Rather than allowing this anniversary to re-traumatize or reignite anger and toxic jingoism, we need to focus on the much more difficult work of healing. It is not a quick fix; there is no simple, one-shot solution. We have spent twenty years putting our energy outward, into trying to punish or prevent; and there is reason to believe that those are good and useful things to do, but they have done nothing to move us forward, to heal those wounds and answer the most important question: “what do we do now?”
B. Bever, poet 