The Different Things We're Never Forgetting When We Say "Never Forget"

I find it hard to commemorate the day something truly terrible happened to my country. Anniversaries have a forced quality about them--they are remembrances by design. Also, in many ways, I view the events of 9/11 backwards through so many of the events that followed, and I find it hard to separate honoring the lost and the survivors from my real disgust with some of the things that followed, supposedly in answer to that tragic day. Looking back on 9/11 for me feels like looking back in anger as well as a kind of second-hand grief for the loss of people I never knew, as well as for the loss of security we experienced as a nation--maybe it was a sense of security we shouldn't have had.

But the anger--well, I'm not sure what to do with that. I still have a lot of anger about that day. I'm not spiritual. I meditated in those days right after: "May all sentient beings find their goal." It was my way of unclenching my fists, not trying to blame people, not feeling a kind of vengeance. Anger isn't the most useful of emotions--it clouds the mind and makes people stupid. I was angry with the terrorists for what they had done, but I was angry that a sense of vengeance would prompt people to do drastic things--hate crimes against innocent Muslim people. That the US government would overreact. I was angry that a world that I felt was by no means perfect was thrown, disordered, grief-struck.

Vice-President Biden spoke today of a sleeping giant awakened--I feared a blinded giant thrashing about at NoMan. NoMan did this. And off and on, I wanted to lash out at the NoMan at times--the terrorists and the senseless ideology that delights in terror and chaos, and yet was also bitterly contemptuous of the seemingly self-blinkered policies of the government that represented me. Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Fallujah. I understood the impetus of atrocities in a way, but wanted to bang heads, yell with all my voice--

"Stop it! Stop it all! All violence begets is violence! Why do we do these things!" And all the while in my imagination, I yell these things with my hand a fist, my voice a blade, and I know that sometimes anger is right, and that injustice needs to be answered. The only uncertainty is how we answer violence--with what? And how do we face down injustice? And what do we choose to remember out of all of this, while we're busy not forgetting? And those answers aren't exactly clear. Even ten years out. But I like to think we're reaching for the answer, and that time gets us closer to it.

I am partially in agreement with Krugman on this feeling about the day, but also, I feel Juan Cole's optimism about the Arab Spring, and how maybe, the disastrous vision of Bin Laden was already about to be supplanted when the Towers had come down. I still want to see all people reach their goal--freedom, peace, more. That meaning has evolved for me, and probably for others.

But I still find it a very difficult thing to conventionally commemorate, and listening to the speeches and all was more than I could do.