(Don't) Never Forget

I visited the World Trade Center memorial in New York before the whole thing was really finished. The security lines ran through a half-finished building cordoned off by those New York City police sawhorse barricades. The unfinished hallways were still sectioned off with clear plastic draping, lining the narrow way, on either side of the metal detectors and the occasional phalanx of security and police. What is probably now a lovely visitors' reception center and gift shop at the time was still a half-realized idea, the first really solid steps forward after what seemed like an interminable period of scrambling to survive.

The actual footprint memorial, with the engraved names and the flowing water, was intact though, a void surrounded by buildings made more of scaffolding and potential, held up with potential and hope. The acts and the memories of 9/11 made something as solid and elemental as a city skyline feel tentative, speculative, dubious even. We were standing, after all, in the footprints of two pillars of the earth, as permanent as mountains, lost and buried under their own weight. The memorial stood as a negative, in shades of sepia monochrome, reminding a lot of us of the new (but timeless) lesson that eventually, if you hang around long enough, the last direction is always down.

This year as the anniversary approached, we're reminded over and over, with increasing levels of strident pathos required to conjur the memory of the horror as it necessarily fades with the distance of years, to do as we have always been excoriated to do: NEVER FORGET. Not the more positive, elegiac supplication to "always remember," but the startling, scornful threat, a dare almost or at least certainly a challenge.

If you take away nothing else from reading this uncharacteristically (so far) dick-joke free paean* to Being Sad About Stuff, hopefully it's that you have the permission to go ahead and forget.

Not all of it, certainly. Look, I have two degrees in history, so I will obviously tell you it's worth the effort to retain in mind what is arguably the second most historically momentous thing to happen in my lifetime.** But history as a discipline, despite how you were probably taught it, isn't just "hey, let's sit around and remember stuff." You're thinking of nostalgia. History is an evolving, self-regulating field of study that only exists to examine and re-examine and re-re-examine itself and its own presumptions. If it didn't change, we would have been done with it with Pliny the Elder or at the very latest Edward Gibbon. History if nothing else is a social and professional outlet for people who like to be dismissive dicks about people exactly like them who had the intellectual misfortune of having been born before them. All history is revisionist history.

I'm saying this is a good thing. There has been a lot of talk over the last week about the "9/12 feeling." What they're trying to evoke is a sense of national unity and patriotic communality, a common purpose and forgiving brotherhood between Americans and the flags they made slow, respectful love to in a Biblically acceptable fashion**** back in 2001.

But it's also probably also OK to trace backward from 2019 to maybe see the virulence behind the jingoism and the at-the-time justifiable paranoia that perhaps ossified into the intractable partisanship of today, where those who disagree are not only villains who mean you harm but also (as you've heard a thousand times, from every direction by now) hate America.

The thing I keep thinking of though, as a person who has sought help from a qualified mental health professional, is that NO therapist is going to tell you it's a good idea to annually relive and then fetishize the source of your trauma. It might not look like trauma if you didn't actually lose anyone, but if you're like me, you remember being wide open to the idea that, between the moment you first got a call or turned on the television that Tuesday until some undefined date in the next day or two or fourteen, you didn't REALLY know if you and your loved ones were safe. And now every year we're commanded: go back there. Live there. Be there. Touch that sense of helpless paralysis and nebulous threat.

There's nothing I will ever say or do that will diminish the wrenching panic or the astonishing heroism of the day. But if you're looking for it, you have my permission to let the rest of it go. No bullshit cut-and-paste Facebook post is going to bring back the days when people were nice to each other in Wal-Mart parking lots for a day or two and oh-by-the-way also some rednecks beat up Sikh-Americans going about their regular business, so maybe stop trying? Grow as a person. Understand it, integrate it and move on. But you don't have to listen to me if you don't want to. If you want to hold on to 9/12 and all its attendant, accumulated psychoses and syndromes, you have more than enough opportunity to get red-faced and shout things with like-minded people in a crowd. See you next August in Charlotte.

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*I'm not certain if "paean" itself counts as a dick joke, but I supposed it depends on how you pronounce it.

**First is obviously New Coke.***

***OK, maybe the fall of communism. But New Coke though, lololol...

****Face-on missionary with the intent of procreation.