MANHATTAN, New York – In walking over 30,000 steps around New York on Sunday, September 10th 2023, it’s impossible to say “America has forgotten.” There are still some, albeit faded, banners that adorn windows on the Upper West, and Upper East sides. There is of course the hulking monument in the form of the Freedom Tower itself, and the gargantuan fountains at its feet. There’s also the swathes of charitable work associated with 9/11 – one of which I take part in every year.
But for all the heart wrenching memories of the past 22 years, it has begun to feel like the memory of 9/11 is fading. And it feels churlish to suggest this isn’t anything but natural. The passage of time. A new generation which has no living memory of the event now takes up residence in the neighborhoods surrounding the old trade center. Why would they remember? They were never around in the first instance.
It sets one’s mind wandering, as to who might be around today were it not for 9/11. Not just here in New York. Not just in D.C., or in Pennsylvania, or around the nation. But around the world too.
The 9/11 legacy isn’t limited to those who died on that day. But extends to the liberties that died alongside it, and the millions killed – Americans and otherwise – in the wars that ensued. Such a remembrance would’ve been heinous and impossible two decades ago. Honoring even the civilians dead in foreign battlefields would’ve felt like a betrayal. But now we know better, it is even more important to remember the scale of destruction caused by 9/11, its perpetrators, and those home and abroad who used it to destroy American liberties.
Temporary measures like the PATRIOT Act have never gone away. The U.S. government used 9/11 and a number of other “threats” to bear down further on their fellow citizens. Indeed the wide-scale persecution by the state of those who would’ve been thought of as nothing but red-blooded Americans on that day 22 years ago is a direct, knock-on effect of allowing for the security state to rank above American freedoms in the public conscious, and too in public policy.
For the younger generations, there has never been a time when you didn’t have to remove your shoes, your watch, your sunglasses, your computers, your dignity, simply to travel around your own country. It’s a memory they never had. It’s a thing they have no ability to remember.
So today, when I write about America “fading” memory – it’s not just the outnumbering of the American flag on many street corners of the United States – usurped by whatever latest multicultural, or pansexual offering there happens to be on display this year. It’s also the frustrating passage of time that attempts to wrest from us some of the memories so seared into our minds that it is almost impossible not to stop in our tracks and well up with grief. We all feel it. And we’re all allowed to feel it.
Don’t barely remember, today. Really remember. And talk about it to those who need to know.
We all said we’d never forget. Let’s keep our promise.
