It’s funny how quickly the collective memory of people fades. Nothing points that out more to us than anniversaries though. Monday was the 5th anniversary of 9-11 and much like 9-11-01 my morning started out with me waking up, hopping into my car and heading off to do my morning routine. Granted, this year I was heading to class before work, but I did notice something in my morning radio station hopping. It seemed to me that shows either tended to be completely ignoring the anniversary or were dedicating their entire show to it.
What each show did depended on the format. The local rock station was doing their usual “Go Steelers” Monday morning. Not being a football fan is quite a chore when you live in Pittsburgh. Of course, the conservative morning talk show host was doing a dedication to 9-11, then using his breaks in it to reaffirm once again that what George Bush was doing was the right course of action, all the while trying to say he wasn’t politicizing the event. The odd contrast of complete avoidance and total dedication is what struck me though.
I had spent the week before 9-11 reading up on the Loose Change video by checking out some of the debunking sites that are available on the web. For those who aren’t familiar with Loose Change, it’s a conspiracy theory video that’s going around the internet that insists that the US government was involved with and lied about 9-11. They state that the towers were brought down with military implanted controlled explosives, even going so far as to insinuate that Flight 93 did not crash and possibly the towers were hit with missiles and not jet liners. The complete absurdity of this didn’t hit me until I was listening to one of those early morning dedication shows.
I had turned it off on my way to class because it was the usually sappy dripping love fest with recorded quotes from victim’s families. Don’t get me wrong, some people buy into that sort of thing, I don’t. I think that kind of false sentimentality goes hand in hand with the waves of false patriotism that we felt in the few months that ended the year 2001. Flags on your house, stickers that say you hate Osama and a ribbon on your car do not make you patriotic when you haven’t voted in the last 10 years and don’t plan on it in the future. That’s the topic of another rant though. After class I had gotten back into the car and headed to work, this time flipping back to that dedication program wondering if the same sap was on and hoping that maybe they had switched to something else. I was entranced with what I heard.
TV tends to focus on the pictures of the events and the victims and their families. Radio has only the use of sound. The sounds that I heard was just a montage of the radio traffic that occurred with all the emergency crews that were in Manhattan that morning. While my usual reaction is to avoid this kind of stuff, I listened closely, mesmerized by what I was hearing. The Fire, Police and EMS all talking, some remaining calm, some shouting orders, some just making shocked commentary and being told to keep quiet. These were the people that saw the horror. They were the ones that were on scene, trying to keep control of a situation that by definition could not be controlled. Hearing the shock and horror in their voices as the buildings fell, as they reported seeing jumpers falling to their death fleeing the fire, or the first hand reports of the second plane hitting the tower, it all brought back the truth of the events of that morning.
Hearing that more than any of the other media coverage that I watched during the day, including the speech that President Bush had made later that evening, brought back to me the reality of what had happened. America had been attacked. Yet, that short simple phrase, America has been attacked, seems to fade from everyone’s memory when the date doesn’t read 9-11. The intervening years have been safe for us. Given us time to remove ourselves from the event and become cynical, making things like Loose Change possible. Sure there have been a scare here and there, but nothing major on our shores. It’s easy to forget about the London Subway bombings. They happen too far away to be real to us. Because of this we’re being lulled back into a sense of false sense of security, forgetting the attack of that morning. Is it a tragedy? Yes. Is it a historic event? Yes. But above all else, it was an attack. A stab at us from a people who are jealous of our way of life. A group of people with such seething hatred for us that they felt the need to snuff out their own lives to take out a greater number of our own. Faced with that fact, 9-11, while remaining a day of mourning, should also be the day that we remind ourselves why we are bound to fight back until this enemy is destroyed.
