Dear Reader,
Sometimes, I am unsatisfied because it seems that there is so much to experience in this world and such a finite to experience it in. Maybe that is why I like reading so much, I can live vicariously through other’s words. Sometimes I find out that I don’t really want to do something, but I still enjoy that the author allowed me to tag along in their adventure. Sometimes I read a book about something that I am interested in, and it makes me want to experience it even more for myself and not just take somebody’s word for it. It is amazing to me that two people can experience the same thing, but they will never experience it exactly like the other person. This also frustrates me to no end, because I will never feel the exact emotional sensation that another person will when remembering a shared event. Of course, we may have the same general emotion, but I will never experience the exact emotional identification tag for that memory as the other person.
These past few weeks, which also happened to be the 25th anniversary for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, I found a package of newspapers that someone had saved from 9/11-16/2001. I didn’t have to try hard to imagine what those people were feeling. I was only two when 9/11 happened, so I don’t remember anything from that day, but my early childhood memories were formed in the vivid aftermath of the following years. There was never any big conversation with my parents about what happened on that day, it was just a fact of life. There used to be two towers in New York City and one day terrorists crashed two airplanes into them. The towers collapsed and a lot of people died and firefighters got trapped underneath. Sometimes though, we would see the twin towers in older episodes of Reading Rainbow. There was even a Reading Rainbow episode where kids from Manhattan talked about what things were like after and how they had to do school on the floor because they didn’t have any desks. That was the first time I realized the effects of the attacks went beyond that day. What I didn’t understand was why these kids were so scarred by the event; it wasn’t like they were actually in the building.But when there were soldiers overseas that needed my letters and other things that we could collect, there wasn’t much time to worry about the past, we just needed to catch the bad guys.
That rapidly changed when my dad first played Where Were You when the World Stopped Turning by Alan Jackson when I was about ten. Suddenly, it wasn’t just something that happened, it was something that happened to real people. It seems after that, every year I learned some new horror that happened on that day. This year I was the same age that my dad was on 9/11 and for some reason I felt like asking more questions to the point where my mom said, “Marisol, it was just really bad.” My dad even commented on how he didn’t realize until recently how seeing everything on the news traumatized that generation.
I come from an odd in-between generation that doesn’t remember that day or may not have even been born but feel like we lived it. A generation that lived through and whose lives were shaped by “Never Forget.” And somehow, we have forgotten.
We forgot the devastation of that day and the memories are now muddled with frivolous conspiracy theories that disregard the sacredness of human lives lost that day. Could there have been actions taken that day for a better outcome? Maybe, but no one was expecting exactly what happened. Could the aftermath of Afghanistan gone differently? Probably. But in the midst of nuance, my generation has forgotten somehow that real evil exists in this world that cannot be explained away by childhood trauma or mental illness. Sometimes my generation needs to watch the videos and see the horrific pictures just like a child might need their finger burned so they don’t touch a hot stove. Let us feel the pain of a small blister on a fingertip so that we do not feel the flames of burning buildings.
To the older generation I would say, remember with us through the tears, so that we do not cry tears from our own preventable tragedies. Explain to us the thinking of these horrible people, so that we can recognize them in our own time and not see them laughing at memorials as honored guests.
Keep telling us so that we also don’t forget to have hope that better days will come too.
