Do you remember? It's the week of the sixth anniversary of those attacks on secular, Western, capitalist culture. Do you remember? Six years ago Tuesday, nineteen fundamentalist Islamic terrorists hijacked four airplanes, three of which reached their targets as fuel-laden kinetic missiles. Fifteen Saudis, an Egyptian, a Lebanese and two people from the United Arab Emirates: evidence that hatred of a common enemy knows no bounds. Do you remember? Smoking towers - gaping holes - fire and dust and shrieking steel - explosions and fear and screams - do you remember it?
How could you forget?
Psychological shocks like the one on Sept. 11, 2001 seem to happen at most once each generation. The Greatest Generation had Pearl Harbor; before that, the Lusitania; before that, the Maine. The Baby Boomers had President John F. Kennedy and now all of us have that crystal blue sky, those black smoke stains, the silver streak and orange fireball indelibly graved on our memory. My mother can tell me exactly where she was when she learned Kennedy was shot; I can tell you exactly where I was (in the middle school hallway, outside of the science classroom, checking my locker between first and second period) when I first learned about the attacks.
Do you remember? You'll probably never forget. You won't be thinking about it constantly, but it will always be there. Every 11th of September for the rest of your life, you'll write the date down - on check, taking notes or putting a report together or perhaps you'll just glance at the calendar - and then, unbidden, images of a scarred Pentagon and collapsing towers will rise to the front of your mind.
Nobody will be forgetting anytime soon. So why do we need to be constantly reminded? Because rare generational psychological jarring is a windfall for whomever happens to be in power at the time. The Lusitania gave Woodrow Wilson an excuse to get the United States involved in a European land contest; Pearl Harbor facilitated America's entrance into World War II; the Maine prompted our nation's first imperialist conquests.
And the Sept. 11 2001 attacks have, of course, been used and abused and then used some more. Take, for example, the lead-up to the Iraq war: the Administration juxtaposed 9/11 and Saddam Hussein so frequently that a majority of Americans believe Iraq was connected to 9/11 simply through Pavlovian conditioning. Consider how the president immediately ties any suggestion that we withdraw from Iraq to the door opening for a new attack on the same scale as those six years ago.
But on the other side of the political spectrum, some 30 percent of Americans believe the federal government abetted the attacks. It should be needless to say that such beliefs are ungrounded in fact, but instead of accepting that the Bush administration were bumbling incompetents in national security and then swarmed all over the attacks like scavenging vultures, they must make out the upper echelons of government as complicit in a vast conspiracy to strike at America. And so, instead of using the attacks to further a foolish neoconservative foreign policy, they use the public's memory to try to advance an agenda against the Bush administration.
History is a chain of mistakes. 9/11 was simply a culmination of a series of mistakes that included the mishandled Western occupations of the Middle East around the turn of the last century; the rise of fundamentalism in Islam; the Cold War and American mollycoddling of Israel; and the rise of American Zionism and the subsequent mistakes in Middle Eastern foreign policy. It is only natural that upon 9/11, more mistakes are built: the war in Iraq; saber-rattling against Iran; the insipid, meaningless flag-waving jingoism that invaded our culture.
I remember what happened that day six years ago: I remember, and I vow that memory will not be abused and will not be sullied by political dishonesty. Do you?
Write to Neal at necoleman@bsu.edu
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