The rote and meaningless portrayal of solemnity.

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One of the strangest things about getting older is watching entropy do its thing. Not just to my own body (such that it is)… but to all things. It’s eerie and sad to see an event so vivid for you, pale and diminish over time into just one more little thing that plunks dumbly off the young. As someone who was 20 years old on 9/11, I’m always a little shocked to remember that for young people, 9/11 has an ever diminishing return on significance. Never was this concept more clear than when I was a teacher.

Every year, on the day, I’d assign my students an essay or article about it – most often Tom Junod’s Falling Man which I recommend you read – then spend the entire class discussing it, their own experience of the day, and what those experiences have come to mean now. It was a hit at first. But as the years and semesters wore on, their memories grew fuzzier around the edges, their experiences less immediate, until finally I hung it up and just moved on to the next thing.

I was in bed when the first plane hit. It was right at the start of my sophomore year of college. I was living in my first apartment. Off campus. Very adult. Very exciting. My roommate woke me up to tell me there’d been some accident in New York; I should come see. We spent the next thirty minutes watching the tower smolder in the background as we gathered our things for class. Then the second plane hit. At some point we sat down and watched them both collapse on television. We watched it all in near silence. And then, knowing no other alternative, we grabbed our bags and went to class.

It’s bonkers in retrospect, but then everything is bonkers in retrospect. Absolutely nothing had prepared us for something so upending and uncanny. On campus, the students drifted dutifully from class to class; teachers half-taught their lessons, half-counseled their kids; classmates sat in silence, entranced by the dream of it all, until their cellphones rang, and they’d explode from the room to answer it. My university would cancel classes later in the day, of course. But for a few hours that morning, we all drifted together.

Eight years later, I took a job teaching at that same university… and every September the sights and smells of campus autumn did their Proust thing. Threw me right back to that morning. Only then, when I’d drift into class on 9/11… I’d have to teach something. Chaucer, most likely… September is always time for Chaucer. I wanted to understand 9/11 as the social metaphor it was becoming. We were already two wars and countless atrocities in… 9/11 had come to mean so much already that I wanted to know what my students made of it – the remembrances, the rhetoric, the vinyl towers silhouetted on windshields, the magnetic American flag bumper stickers, the anthems and the bonfires… and always the thrumming, insistent creed that we Never Forget. That’s the one that always got me. The one I never got. I assigned a short essay on the meaning of that phrase – Never Forget. Something like, “Why do we say never forget, and not always remember?” The answers I received were varied and vivid. Conversation lasted all class long. At least in the early years. 

I’ve always found Never Forget a troubling phrase. It always rang so hollow to me – to expect a unified response to something we all experienced together, yes… but ultimately, terribly alone. We commemorate as a society, sure. But we remember alone. We mourn alone. We look for meaning alone. It’s a lonely business, being a person.

There’s something tiresome, and to me deeply disrespectful about how quickly we commodified 9/11 – the bumper stickers, t-shirts, and decals, the syrupy gifs and memes and schlocky slogans all insisting upon a certain tone of how to remember. Or, rather, how we must refuse to forget. 

Never Forget has always been too easy to say, and too cheap to deliver. It requires nothing more than obedience and obeisance. It calls upon no action. Demands no reflection. Summons no change. It urges no understanding of its cause, nor instruction for how best to prevent its recurrence. Never Forget demands nothing but our static, silent, horrified appraisal. It’s a symbol, sacred in the public imagination… yet entirely devoid of any meaning. It’s content. It’s branding. And a brand is just a false promise, written in the language of sincerity, to sell you something you don’t need. Because if you really needed it… nobody would have to tell you. You’d just remember.  

For those too young to remember 9/11, it will no doubt vanish into the horizon soon enough. You can’t forget something you couldn’t remember in the first place. But for the rest of us? What will we do with these two decades of perspective? What do we do with all of… this?

If the last 30 minutes I spent on social media are any indication, we’ll do the same stupid things we’ve done for the last two decades. Those on the nihilistic, online right will continue to pornography it – wring it out for every hoot and holler of cheap applause, huff themselves dizzy on racist, violent, jingoistic urge. And those on the nihilistic, online left will do what they tend to do – snark and snarl from a safe distance… diminish it just enough to stand on, so as it give them the illusion of being bigger, and hopefully snatch a few seconds (clicks, shares, etc.) of attention.

What dreadful people we’ve turned out to be. Not all of us, sure. But enough of us. 

All this to say: If you’re sad today, I’m sorry. If you’re sad every day, I’m sorry for that too. And I don’t blame you. It’s sad when people are cruel to each other. It’s sad when people die. It’s sad when we hurt each other. And it’s sad we never remember to stop.