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Will We Ever Stop Reacting to the Pain of 9/11?
When #NeverForget means Never Heal
A few years ago, I was buying dishes from a thrift store and the man behind the counter wrapped them up in a newspaper I think he’d meant to sell. The paper was an old copy of the New York Times, dated September 12, 2001. “U.S. ATTACKED,” the headline read, above an apocalyptic photo of the towers going down. The fires and the smoke spoke for themselves. “President vows to exact punishment for ‘evil.’”
I unwrapped a porcelain bowl and stared down at faded, paper history. The pictures of it were still enough to make my stomach clench, two decades later. The most grimly iconic smoke plume in American history, an organic mess against the clean rectangle of a tower, not yet collapsed.
Everything changed that September morning.
I was born after the Berlin Wall fell and raised in the hopeful techno-futurist fantasy of the 1990s, when the end of the Cold War and the rise of humanitarianism and the Internet made us think the world might really give peace a chance at last. Al Gore had started us in on global warming, but we didn’t understand it then like we do today. Back then, chads were not alpha males, but bits of paper clinging onto ballots. It was on the hanging chads that we hung the fate of a nation.
