My parents’ apartment is a time capsule. After my dad’s death in August, my brothers and I started sorting and cleaning out their cherished possessions.
When you go through someone’s bedside table, you get a good understanding of what they thought about. In the stacks of books and magazines in their Grand Traverse Commons condominium, I found several magazines that are precisely 22 years old: vintage copies of New York magazine, The New Yorker, and Time with a mono-theme of Sept. 11, 2001. Looking to displace my grief, I sat in a bedroom chair and read them back-to-back.
I had the feeling of watching a fully absorbing documentary. The issues spoke of a time, not that long ago, but, oh, so long ago. Our country was simply a different place then. From New York Magazine, “The TV and newspapers called it an attack on America, which was true, but, at the moment, irrelevant: It was an attack on us.”
As I looked at photos of Americans in New York and Washington who were at ground zeros of hate, I couldn’t help but think that, at least at that time, we were an “us.” There wasn’t red and blue America; there was just America, and we were a United States in shock and grief.
How can we be so indulged in forgetting that national threat and nightmare? Airports were in lockdown, but no one seemed to be dividing us. Our enemy united us.
Children born that year are nearly college graduates and are spilling into a society where we have honestly forgotten how to get along.
One article almost seems like a parody: “Around City Hall, In Charge. The best of Rudy Giuliani.” You can hardly turn on the TV or read a newspaper without being reminded how we are the worst of ourselves.
Speakers, including Giuliani, exhibited unthinkable behavior for encouraging a riot on Jan. 6, 2020, at the US Capitol at the very site many feared the doomed United Flight 73 was headed.
The Capitol was spared that day, and so was the White House, but spared for what?
How have we used those days in any sacred way? What do we stand for now? Self-serving political spectacles, social media, influencers, banning books?
I have no answer for how we really rewind time to remember how we felt in the aftermath of Sept. 11. If you can find a way, I recommend it. Find an old magazine or Google – which was only three years old then – how to remember Sept. 11. The first site listed is for the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. That might be an excellent place to remind yourself.
Another option is to find a way to listen to the reading of the names of the dead. This year, the 22nd anniversary, a “commemoration ceremony will take place on the Memorial plaza and focus on an in-person reading of the names by family members … acknowledging when each of the World Trade Center towers was struck and fell and the times of the attack on the Pentagon and the crash of Flight 93.”
Maybe try one of these and then keep the focus on how we can do better together.
There is always room for improvement this year.
