Forum Editorial: ‘Never forget’

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What does it mean to never forget?

Unlike other days of national remembrance, like Veterans Day or Memorial Day, there are no soldiers who fought and died for freedom on September 11th, 2001. There are no battles to mark, no homecomings for war-weary heroes returning from the front lines.

There was no victory.

Instead, there are nearly 3,000 lives to mourn, their dreams cut short, their remaining families forever robbed of their company. There are hundreds more who died saving those trapped in the rubble of the World Trade Centers, and still hundreds more killed slowly and painfully over the years from illnesses they contracted while doing the same.

For those who are personally connected to the senseless attacks, there’s no question about what it means to never forget.

They can’t.

But even those of us who didn’t lose someone in the attacks and who were far removed from the tragedies on the east coast — even we swore we would never forget.

There is a generation of young adults out in the world now who never lived in the world of September 10th. For them, the past 22 years have been one surreal experience after another, so maybe the events of September 11th aren’t so unimaginable to them. Perhaps they’re just disturbing videos of a historical event, rather than reality on replay.

But to those of us who turned on our televisions that Tuesday morning in horror, it’s difficult to express the fear that gripped us by the throat, to explain the sense of community we felt with our brothers and sisters more than a thousand miles away — with our fellow Americans — bonded through our fear of what would come next.

Anyone who was aware of what was going on that day knew the world had changed — and they didn’t know how. Instead, we only knew that the new September 12th world would be filled with more fear, and that we would not feel safe behind our borders again. Our reality had been shattered, and for a moment, we, as a united people across the nation, vowed we would never forget that feeling.

More than two decades later, it’s difficult to memorialize that feeling, and it has crystallized into different forms for different people. But by and large, we’ve succeeded in finding new ways to divide one another, to reach new levels of fear and, maybe most disgracefully, to turn even health care for the first responders who today are still suffering the effects of their rescue efforts into a political football.

For the generations who came after, this is the only reality they have known. In fact, perhaps the most difficult part of the events of September 11th for a young person to come to terms with is that we here in Missouri and beyond felt our fellow Americans’ pain on the east coast so deeply, shared a national trauma so acutely, that for a moment, however brief, our partisanship disappeared, our dividing lines dissolved, and no matter where you were across this country, no matter what your beliefs or political party or anything else — we remembered that what binds us together as Americans should always be stronger than what pushes us apart.

And that, we should never forget.