We have discovered the limits of our collective national memory – it’s about 8 years. There was almost nothing in the news until this morning, and even today’s headlines in the nation’s leading papers reflect the sense that we have moved on, that if anything, we are remembering an event that not only occurred in the past, but is no longer a real part of our present.
I guess it’s a good thing that we are making so little of the eight anniversary of the 9/11 attacks – good insofar as it reflects a diminishing level of fear, anxiety and suspicion in our country. A certain amount of forgetting is appropriate — it’s part of the healing process. But we need to figure how to let go a little w/o forgetting almost entirely.
I cannot help but wonder if we have not strayed too far down that latter path, the one of forgetting the past so much that we learn no lessons from it.
When any nation’s memories are overly animated by a sense of their own victimization, they invariably become victimizers. The examples are legion and most obviously, include the collective thinking of those who flew the planes into the Pentagon, the Twin Towers, and a field in Pennsylvania. When any nation forgets past attacks though, it sets itself up to be attacked again.
We need to figure out how to keep memory alive in ways that helps us to build a better and more secure future without dredging up hurt and rage to mobilize us. That’s never easy to do, but if we cannot do so, we are positioning ourselves for one of two futures: either we continue to be victims or we become just another version of those who victimized us.
Neither of those is acceptable and we all have a role in making sure that neither of them happens. Thinking about that role is one way each of us can keep the past with us while keeping our eyes focused on the future.