LIFESTYLE COLUMN: REMEMBERING WHY WE SHOULD NEVER FORGET 9/11

For a Time, the World Was a Sincere Place, and Love - the Real Thing - Was True

By: Josh Moorhead

September 11, 2011

This is a selfish act.

My writing this article is selfish. My being in the circumstances to write this article is selfish. Not going to war was selfish. I'm not writing this because I think my words have that much more to offer. I'm writing this for me. Because I want to remember.

I'm not sure what happened in the past ten years, or whatever changed in the years before that; I don't know if it was post-modernism or relativism, or what was wrong in our right response to that horrible day, but I look at the world around me, and what permeated for a time in a decade-old September could be a myth today. What was felt then should still be felt now; it doesn't carry the weight of a phantom limb for some, even as its ramifications leave real ghosts and palpable worries for families who could be right down the street, for all we know.

Maybe we're too blessed. I know I am. I whine because I cannot get the exact job I want or can't afford this weekend at the movies. And a world over -- one I've never seen but one I've both wrongly and rightly argued policy for in this past decade -- someone my age takes a club to the head in a rally in the street for something I take for granted and treat with all the respect of my pinky toe: freedom. Somewhere over there, a guy I went to high school with administers care to a wounded soldier in his unit, while I surf craigslist for production gigs. How trite. How selfish.

These stories are true. They're on the news if you watch; they're in that guy's memories if you talk to him or his family. If you don't live in a world reduced to the soundbite. If you haven't totally reacclimated yourself to a detached irony once proclaimed dead ten years ago and which is now prevalent. Something happened and we forgot what real is, even as we watched the curtains of a more shallow existence fall in dust and debris and fire that Tuesday. Something happened in our exceptionalism, and we were able to go back to our regular lives, as we were told to, as we should have, with such ease that we were brave in not letting terror win the day, but we weren't courageous enough to let duty or debt more fully inform us.

No. Not all of us could or should have joined the military. Not all of us could have lifted buckets of dirt at ground zero. And plenty of us did what we could and more than was asked of us in ways large and small. From prayer to donated blood or funds, giving can never be too small, and the most remarkable thing about those times was how our hearts were so noticeably entwined. But what we could do now is remember, even as what so many of us have been doing, what could be cowardice, ignorance, and disrespect, what would be waste, what would be easy, is to forget.

Don't forget. Not because it seems either too distant or too real. Don't forget if the memories are painful; don't forget if you disdain the politics of the years after. Even they are important. Don't disengage. Time and reality so rarely offer truly tactile moments. September 11th obviously is not a day to be celebrated, and it will never be a day of joy. But it ought to be -- especially at this anniversary, where so much time and circumstance has elapsed -- a day of remembrance. A day of reflection. A day of identity like those after the attack; a day beyond party or faith or whatever disagreement or priority or worry you had on that Tuesday morning before 9:00 a.m. It should be, as it was, a day of resilience, a day of resurrection, a time of bigger things.

There are things that are sensationalistic, that are emotionally manipulative, that ought to be brushed off. And this is not one of them. Failing to recognize the sheer veracity, the reality of the world that was September 11, 2001 is not only to disrespect those who lost their lives as victims and those that gave them then and in the years since so freely as volunteers, but it is also to shamefully accept an ignorance about the fallout, historically, that informs much of our present world or identity as a people and our choices, and the trajectory with which those things will be carried into the future.

To not remember, in a real way, is to bury oneself back into a world less real and too easy, to again spurn the call to selflessness, to a greater sense of community and empathy, to a greater appreciation for -- as the saying too easily says and is too rarely realized -- the more important things. To reject the importance and the impact of 9/11 on a visceral level is emotionally absent at best, calloused at worse, sorrowfully forgetful at the least. And to reject a knowledge of our politics and history in the intervening years, whether with good cause -- a debatable war or not, a hopeless attitude -- is irresponsible, childish, wasteful.

For us to go on too efficiently with our lives without even a moment to pause to recognize how they've been shaped is to live no effective life at all; to be so childish would be to disservice a younger generation that will look to us as an example of what a real moment in history really means. Not the faux-controversy of the 24-hour news cycle; not the drama of reality television, but the piercing end of when something really happens and what that represents. To be recovered is well and victory; to be healed is desirable and grace, but to have bypassed wisdom and reverence is too great a folly. To live with too much distance from the experiences from which we learn is a cruel carelessness for those who lost their lives and those who still risk them to this day and to ourselves for being no better, no wiser, no more realized than before.

I don't preach because I'm equally guilty -- I implore. What have most of us had to sacrifice? And how easily we forget. How great a blessing is it that we live in a nation so affluent and sturdy that we were able to go on so easily and -- maybe, unfortunately -- isolated? There's only so much use in reliving the sadness, and there's no real redemptive purpose in trying to recapture the terror. If memory should serve -- and on this anniversary it should, and as our lives go on, and the memory grays, and a day in reality becomes a second-hand story for a grandkid's essay -- we should remember how truly not hopeless those days were. In truth, I remember being afraid, and most all of us were for a time -- a time that was not days and may have not even been hours. And for a time that followed that first wave of shock, I've never been so inspired in my life.

It's the sad idiom that says people only come together for a funeral, and that was a blue sky morning that was then drenched in black. It was a period of days after, or weeks or months, maybe even years -- on this a decade fogs -- of real calling hours, of mourning, but it was a banding together like I'm afraid I may never see again, and dread for what reason it might be that I would.  That's why it serves to remember this. For a time in the fall of 2001, the world was a sincere place. And love, the real thing, where strangers carried strangers over shoulders down 60 flights of burning stairs, or held each other on the streets, or shared prayer and comfort across faith and race and affiliation and nation, or wrote a letter of thanks, or sent a firetruck in aide in the aftermath was true. So true. To have missed it then is a loss. To forget it now...worse.

For a while in that September, "United" meant more and will mean more to me than it ever will again. I saw it. I touched it. We all did. Do you remember? For a few days in September, after we'd survived, we bolstered in collective strength in spirit. We could do anything and more than just recover. We could surpass the hollow facade of a less impactful life. Of a more distant existence from one another and of a lukewarm heart. We could see the preciousness of a moment and feel that, in their so frequent passing, one might even be seized. If we can remember, we might slow life again, might find clarity through life's debris again, and take that moment back -- not the one that was taken from us in the fire and loss and confusion and violence, though memory would rightfully respect that pain -- but memory could also harness the moment more worth holding than fear -- the one that we found and forged in the rubble, rescued, and began rebuilding when the smoke cleared. It was a kind of faith. A permeating belief. An active compassion. A greatness thought passed. For another generation. But it was us. We could do anything. Do you remember?

We.

We could do anything.

What have we done?

What will we do?

Charity Navigator list of 9/11 charities.

Operation Gratitude, care packages for service members.

9/11 Service Events from the National registry of Community Service.

USA Cares, Donations for struggling military families.

The Red Cross.