The raw horror of that day comes back so easily. For me, it just takes an image of those smoking skyscrapers.
I own a book that simply shows the front pages of newspapers all over the world in the 24 hours after 9/11. The powerful photos and tragic, poignant headlines in huge fonts bring back that day in a visceral way. I usually pause on this anniversary to look at it again. Not this year, however. With nearly all our books packed up with other belongings in the wake of a plumbing disaster at our house this summer—I haven’t written about that yet in this digital space—that book is inaccessible.
And despite the hashtag reminders on social media and remembrance events invoking the phrase “never forget,” Sept. 11, 2001, seems far away in many ways. Nearly a generation on, too many people who should know better use this date simply to further their own crusades.
Today, the current president raged against the media, election polls and the Federal Reserve chairman before addressing the day’s remembrance.
In North Carolina, while some Democratic legislators attended an anniversary ceremony, Republicans in the state house used their absence to hold a surprise budget vote in an attempt to override a governor they don’t like.
Rudy Giuliani, lauded in the days after Lower Manhattan exploded and now the president’s lawyer, started this day by tweeting a clip from a jingoistic clothing ad that seems to celebrate police taking on protesters.
All this after the summer’s unnecessarily contentious and frankly shameful battle to have Congress reauthorize the compensation fund supporting 9/11 first responders, who have been devastated by cancer and respiratory diseases. While many firefighters and police officers rushed into the burning World Trade Center buildings and lost their lives, hundreds more have died in the years since because of these ailments.
Even at the annual reading of 9/11 victims’ names this morning, a few survivors brought politics to the ceremony. In their case, however, I don’t begrudge them. They didn’t ask to lose relatives and friends on that fateful day, and I’m not going to lecture them on decorum when they have been through terrible loss.
Today, 18 years later, the war launched just weeks after the attacks still drags on with no resolution, and the Taliban still essentially controls Afghanistan despite the considerable amount of blood of shed on the ground there. The entire Middle East and West Asia, from the Mediterranean Sea to the frontier with China, is arguably less stable than it was before 9/11.
On the other hand, U.S. intelligence services, military and security personnel have helped prevent another massive terrorist attack on our soil, which is a remarkable accomplishment. Most of that work is done quietly, with diligent work among people who never get recognition.
Instead, this era has brought frequent mass shootings, staggering economic inequality and rising fear among our fellow Americans about everything from crime (which still hovers near its lowest levels since at least the 1960s) to migrants. Combine that with, here and abroad, nationalistic movements that champion everything from white supremacy to the death of democracy, and I wonder about where future 9/11 anniversaries will find us. Instead of fighting the specter of international terrorism, we’ve turned inward to fight each other.
Even so, this anniversary lurks as I’ve gone through the day. So I’ll end with my 9/11 tradition: listening to “The Boxer,” the song that Paul Simon performed during the opening of the first episode of “Saturday Night Live” after the attacks. These are troubling times, but the hope of that final lyric before the song’s chorus pounds to the end—“but the fighter still remains”—gives me hope for the nation, just as it did in the fall of 2001.
(The public domain photo posted with this essay comes from photographer Denise Gould, USAF/DOD, via flickr.)