I am in charge of social media at work. Why? Because at the time I was one of the few people under the age of 30 in the office.
One of my coworkers sent me a resource to post on said FB page, and it was about a man with a red bandana who went to work saving lives as his own was threatened during the September 11th terrorist attacks. The video itself was great, but afterwards - you know how youtube rolls another video right after the one you've watched finished? It did that to me, but with the live CNN footage from the day-of, fourteen years ago. Which was exactly the footage I watched the day-of, fourteen years ago.
I have three memories from that day, when I was a month from my 14th birthday. It was actually one of my childhood friends' birthdays. One: I woke up around 6 PST, and sat down in front of the news to eat breakfast (my father had been a big CNN man). I remember eating a toasted bagel with strawberry cream cheese and hearing disinterestedly that a single plane had crashed into a building in NYC. I finished my bagel and didn't care much.
Second memory: Riding the public school bus and talking to the-guy-I-had-a-crush-on talk about the plane incident - and that actually a second plane had also crashed into the building next to it. Strange coincidence, I thought. And went on my merry way to school, disinterested.
Ok, second memory part two: The news was on all the TV's at school that day, for the morning anyway. I don't remember much distinctly of what I saw. I do remember seeing some of the videos that they eventually stopped showing....like the view from below, as the second plan hit the building. Disappeared into it like a rock into the ocean. It was sometime during the day that someone else told me that it had been a terrorist attack, not reaaaaaally coincidental accidents.
Third memory: Picking up my sister early from her high school extracurricular activities because she couldn't handle staying the rest of the day. She had seen the videos of people in a panic, launching themselves off the building to avoid being burned....
It still makes me sick to think about it. I'm pretty sure that is a normal human reaction. But there are two things I've noticed over the past fourteen years that I need to process.
The first is my own fascination with the story. Like - WHY did I watch a two hour recap of the footage I had seen years before? Why does my heart still break, why do I need to memorialize the moment in my heart over and over again? Why, when I knew no one and still have not met anyone who was victimized in the attacks, did I need to go to the memorial in NYC and why did I cry, and why did I need peace and healing from this event by watching the waters flow into the footprints of the buildings which were so many people entrances into eternity?
And secondly, why are so many people so obstinate about NOT commemorating the day? I worked on a military base where they sent out a memo to everyone to not fly the flags at half mast that day on the eleventh year. Ok - my best friend who lives in NYC says that it's overdone in the city. Ok, I can get the need to "move on" and widows get remarried and kids go to college and people keep working in the WTC, and that movie that was made was way too soon and making money off of the memories is not cool, not cool at all. But there's a difference between avoiding the marketing of memorialization and just wanting to not remember it at all.
Who was it that said "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it?" I don't remember..ironically enough.. I want to say Teddy Roosevelt but if I'm wrong I'll feel dumb. I don't believe that if I forget this piece of history that I, personally will be responsible for letting another terrorist attack happen. But perhaps the reason it happened at all was because we as a nation forgot that we are humans with weaknesses, and that not everybody likes us - just as history has shown over and over.
That just brings me back in an easy circle to remembering that I am human, and those killed that day were human, and the terrorists themselves were human, and that day, September 11th 2001, all three of those human groups presented their weaknesses. The terrorists, their unlucky belief that this would somehow do Allah any good. Me, that as I ate my bagel and heard of death my first reaction was to consider what I heard to be "Regular News" and therefore not worth noticing. And the victims, that they could not avoid such violence to their bodies no matter how much they tried.
Maybe it's my strange, alien need to be healed from this attack that lashes out against the Forgetters. Perhaps there is a certain amount of "caring" that my heart needs to do for this event, and since I was 2,500 miles away at the time and know no one related to it, that I have needed fourteen years to give a damn; that my heart has to give a quota of emotion for something that was such an atrocity, and for which I didn't feel enough for at first glance. Perhaps it will teach me not to forget history - my own history - so that next time, my heart knows how to react to human loss regardless of how common it is, or how far away.
RMVZ
