What we forget when we remember 9/11

Stephanie A. Martin,
Boise State University

For much of the past 25 years, each anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks has arrived with reminders to “never forget.”

I remember the shock and fear, the second plane hitting the World Trade Center and the towers falling. I remember the missing-person photographs covering New York, the awful recognition that few of those people were likely to be found alive, and the bravery of firefighters and police.

My college students have no such memories. Most were born years later. They encounter 9/11 through photographs, documentaries, memorials, lessons and stories.

Scholars of collective memory argue that societies do not remember the past simply by preserving it. Collective meaning is continually remade through stories, institutions, rituals and political arguments. Forgetting is part of that process. No individual, school or nation can keep everything equally present forever. The question is not whether Americans will forget parts of 9/11, but what remains afterward.

Commemorations preserve the annual reading of victims’ names, memorial lights and stories of first responders, keeping the human loss and courage in view. In a 2016 Pew Research Center survey, 76% of Americans named 9/11 among the 10 most consequential events of their lifetimes.

What I most want preserved is the shared grief and the ways ordinary people revealed their humanity under unimaginable circumstances. Firefighters ran toward mortal danger. Office workers helped colleagues and strangers. Families searched for loved ones after hope had become terribly thin. Passengers on United Flight 93 fought back, sacrificing themselves in hopes of saving others.

Before 9/11 became a justification, policy, war or political symbol, it was an experience of shared human vulnerability.

Yet no event remains sealed inside its original meaning. Sept. 11 became the starting point for political choices that reshaped American life and the memory of the day itself.

The attacks led to the 20-year war in Afghanistan. Next came the invasion of Iraq, although Saddam Hussein’s regime had no role in 9/11. The aftermath also enabled expanded government surveillance, enlarged presidential power and narrowed space for dissent. Muslim Americans faced new suspicion and hostility.

For some, 9/11 is inseparable from the wars and sacrifices of civil liberties made in the name of security – a warning about how fear and grief can make once-unthinkable policies appear necessary. For others, it represents restored American pride and military perseverance. Still others see primarily innocent lives lost.

Since 2001, Americans have experienced Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis, the election of the first Black president, Donald Trump’s rise, the Jan. 6 violence and a global pandemic. Sept. 11 has not become unimportant. Its place in the story changed because the world kept going.

Perhaps this is why “never forget” feels moving yet impossible. Are we to remember the dead, the courage, grief, fear, wars, mistakes or unexpected decency?

A society cannot keep all those things equally vivid forever. The task of collective memory inevitably involves selection. We should preserve the understanding that Sept. 11 was an encounter with human vulnerability and resilience before it became an argument over war, security, patriotism and political allegiance.

Remembering the collective grief and extraordinary human response would not erase what followed. But it might preserve the truth that this was a day of unimaginable horror and tragedy before it became a political inheritance. [Abridged]