What Remembrance is For

A few years ago, I was serving in a U.S. Embassy overseas when September 11 came around again.

There was a ceremony. Flags. Solemn faces. The familiar rituals of remembrance. I watched young Marines raise the flag in honor of people who had died on a September morning in 2001.

Then it struck me. These young Marines had not even been born when September 11 happened. They were commemorating something they had never experienced. Something that belonged not to their memory, but to history.

I remember standing there wondering: What exactly are we asking them to remember?

This year marks twenty-five years since September 11, 2001.

Twenty-five years.

For a quarter of a century we have said the names. Lowered the flags. Rung the bells. Observed the moments of silence. Watched the footage. Told the stories.

And repeated the words: Never Forget.

But lately I have begun wondering whether we have confused never forgetting with never letting go.

They are not the same thing.

What Are We Carrying?

There are things we should remember about September 11.

The nearly 3,000 people who went to work, boarded airplanes, reported for duty, or simply began an ordinary Tuesday morning and never came home.

The firefighters climbing stairs while everyone else was coming down.

Strangers helping strangers.

Families whose lives divided forever into before and after.

Courage.

We should also remember the failures.

And perhaps that is where our national remembrance has become more complicated.

Because remembrance is supposed to teach us something. If we experience something terrible and spend the next twenty-five years remembering it without examining what happened afterward—what fear made us do, what hatred made possible, what power we surrendered, whom we learned to distrust, and how easily frightened people can be manipulated—then what exactly have we accomplished by remembering?

We remembered September 11.

But did we learn anything?

What Fear Does to Us

Fear changes people.

It changes countries, too.

In the months and years after September 11, fear became part of the American landscape. There were legitimate reasons to be afraid. Something unimaginable had happened on our soil, and no one knew what might happen next.

But fear has a way of looking for somewhere to go.

It looks for an enemy.

It looks for someone to blame.

It looks for certainty.

And when we are frightened enough, we can become willing to surrender things we would once have considered essential. Privacy. Nuance. Compassion. Skepticism. Sometimes even our own values.

We went to war.

We expanded surveillance.

Muslim Americans and people merely perceived to be Muslim became targets of suspicion and hate.

We divided the world into us and them.

And twenty-five years later, I wonder whether we ever really stopped.

Perhaps we simply changed who they were.

The Enemy Within

This may be the most difficult thing for me to say on this anniversary.

Twenty-five years after September 11, I am considerably less frightened by an enemy arriving from somewhere else than I am by what fear, division, dishonesty and hatred are doing to us from within.

I look at my country now and barely recognize parts of it.

We increasingly treat disagreement as treason. We sort one another into camps. We consume information designed to confirm what we already believe. We call one another enemies. We cheer cruelty when it is directed toward someone we have decided deserves it.

And some of those impulses are now encouraged from the highest office in the country.

That frightens me.

Not because America has never been divided before. We have.

Not because our leaders have never failed us before. They have.

But because somewhere along the way we seem to have forgotten one of the most important lessons September 11 could have taught us:

Fear makes us vulnerable to people who know how to use it.

An enemy does not have to destroy a country from the outside if the people inside it can be persuaded to destroy their trust in one another.

Maybe that is something worth remembering.

Beverly Eckert Remembered Differently

Recently, my dear friend and author Anthony Toth published a book called A Strong Voice of 9/11: The Life of Beverly Eckert, in Her Words.

Beverly's husband, Sean Rooney, was on the 98th floor of the South Tower on September 11. He called her after the plane struck the building. They remained connected by telephone as he tried to escape.

Sean did not make it out.

Beverly could have allowed that terrible morning to become the defining end of their story.

Instead, she did something with her grief.

She became one of the family members who fought for the creation of the 9/11 Commission. She demanded answers from the government. She pushed for accountability and later pressed Congress to implement the Commission's recommendations. In testimony before Congress in 2004, Beverly explained that the families shared a goal: to make the country safer so that the deaths of nearly 3,000 people would not be meaningless.

That distinction matters to me.

Beverly remembered.

But she didn't only remember.

She learned. She questioned. She acted.

She took grief and tried to turn it into something that might prevent another family from experiencing hers.

That is remembrance I understand.

That is remembrance with purpose.

And perhaps that is why telling Beverly's story twenty-five years later matters more to me than replaying those airplanes striking those buildings one more time.

Her story asks something of us.

Letting Go Is Not Forgetting

We understand this in our personal lives. Anyone who has grieved knows that healing does not require forgetting. We don't erase the person. We don't pretend the terrible thing didn't happen. We tell the stories. We keep photographs. We say their names. We remember who we were before them and who we became because of them.

But eventually, if we are fortunate, we learn to put some things down.

The terror. The rage. The need for someone to blame. The belief that continuing to suffer is somehow proof that we loved enough.

Letting go isn't betrayal.

Sometimes letting go is how we survive.

Perhaps nations have to learn this, too. Perhaps there comes a time when remembrance has to evolve. Twenty-five years is a long time to carry anything. There are now adults raising children who were not alive on September 11. The young Marines I watched raising that flag inherited the responsibility of remembering something they never experienced.

What do we want them to inherit from us?

Surely not our fear. Surely not our hatred. Surely not an enemy.

Give them the history.

Tell them what happened. Tell them about the people who died. Tell them about the firefighters climbing those stairs. Tell them about Sean Rooney. Tell them about Beverly Eckert. Tell them about the mistakes we made afterward, too.

And then tell them what we learned.

Because Never Forget was never supposed to mean Never Put It Down.

Remember the people. The courage. The failures. The lessons.

But let go of the fear. The hatred. The need for an enemy.

Twenty-five years later, perhaps the greatest way we could honor those who died on September 11 is not by proving that we can remember that terrible day forever. Perhaps it is by proving that we became wiser because of it.

And if twenty-five years of remembering has not taught us how to become wiser, kinder, braver and more discerning, then perhaps the question isn't whether we have forgotten September 11.

Perhaps the question is whether we ever learned anything from it at all.