Doug McIntyre: September 11th, 25 years later

“Never forget.”

But we do. It’s inevitable. Maybe even necessary. Can you imagine trying to live our lives bearing all the wounds of human history?

So, we no longer “Remember the Maine” or the Alamo unless we find ourselves in San Antonio with an hour to kill. Each December 7th, a small blurb still pops up in the paper, or a quick clip on the evening news, commemorating Pearl Harbor. This December will be the 85th. Only 11 veterans of that horrible day were still with us as of May. When they depart, there will be nobody who can describe firsthand the sights, sounds, and smells of that horror. The First World War has already evaporated from our collective memory, Armistice Day having surrendered to Veterans Day way back in 1954. So much for “never forget.”

Now we are confronted with the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. A quarter century. For those of us old enough on that day to comprehend the trauma of hijacked airplanes crashing into buildings, we now struggle to comprehend how that day could ever be forgotten. But it will be. One-third of today’s Americans were born after 9/11/01. Forty percent of the people on Earth are post-attack babies. For these billions, September 11th is, at best, a history lesson, only as resonant as the adults in their lives choose to make it.

I am a Boomer. In fact, I was born in the boomingest year of the Baby Boom, 1957. Four million of us arrived in America that year, only a dozen years after World War II’s conclusion. My Uncle Jack Reed fought at Iwo Jima. Uncle Joe Ledeger, not really an uncle, went to France in a glider and carried shrapnel in his back until the day he died. We played soldiers in the backyard with helmets and gear brought home from the war. The Second World War was alive to us—a subject of conversation, with stories told of the chilling arrival of the mailman with a telegram from the War Department, Gold Stars in windows, and ration cards for flour, sugar, cooking grease, tin, and rubber drives. My grandmother, born in Ireland, was a real-life Rosie the Riveter, working the assembly line at the Grumman Aircraft factory. What stories are we telling those millions born in the wake of September 11th?

That all Muslims are terrorists? That America deserved it? That the Deep State did it to us?

If the lessons of 9/11 are not to be lost, the history of what happened and how it happened must be taught, warts and all. But first and foremost, we are required to pass along the sense memory of the pain, the nearly universal hurt, the sense of unity—as fleeting as it was—and the countless acts of bravery, self-sacrifice, and heroism of those who ran toward the disaster rather than from it. History can only teach the facts; it can never pass on the feeling. That’s up to us—those who lived it, who knew the dead, or who know somebody who knew the dead.

Solemn ceremonies with moments of silence and lowered flags provide outlets for our grief. We build memorials as permanent reminders that something huge happened here. But memorials and curated museums can sometimes give false impressions. Holocaust survivors who have summoned the strength to visit Auschwitz remember it differently than it presents today; the gray ash of incinerated humans has been replaced by green, living grass. The stench of death has lifted, and only a few remain who remember what once was.

Jeff Gonzalez flipped a blue Assembly seat. Has he earned another term?

America has lived through many traumatic events. The Civil War. The Great Depression. The Dust Bowl. Floods. Earthquakes. Assassinations. Civil strife… Life continues. We pledge to remember, and those who lived through it all do so at a molecular level. Twenty-five years before I was born, FDR was elected. The country was suffering in the depths of despair. Hitler was on the cusp of power. I know all this from books and a few stories told by my elders. But my father knew the Great Depression from the nearly empty dinner plate put in front of him as a child. My father-in-law learned all about the Nazis while seeking shelter from machine-gun fire under a deuce and a half.

Historians will study the September 11th attacks, an epochal event, far into the future. The causes and cover-ups, the blunders, and the lessons learned or ignored will shape tomorrow every bit as much as they shape today. September 11th changed much more than how we board airplanes. It demonstrated forever that what happens “over there” matters over here. But this anniversary is about remembering. It’s an opportunity to reconnect with how we felt on that horrible day. It’s an opportunity to tell our stories to our children and grandchildren in the hope they will someday tell our story to future generations of Americans.

This column is dedicated to Timothy Coughlin, Nov. 15, 1958 – September 11, 2001.

Doug McIntyre is a columnist for the Southern California News Group.