As They Were on September 11

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
-- Marcel Proust

We are now 22 years on from the tragedy of September 11 2001.

There's little else we can do except remember how those events affected us then and haunt us to this day. 

What becomes troubling is the loss of remembering how things were before that day, what exactly we were enjoying, what we were debating amongst ourselves, what we were hoping to do with our lives in the futures we were about to engage. 

At best I can remember what it was like moving into an actual home at the age of 31 - a townhouse - instead of living in apartments through my 20s. I can remember I was still thinking of living in South Florida as a temporary thing - even though I'd been there since 1994 - because I was still job-hunting for library work back up towards Tampa-Clearwater where my family and high school friends still lived. Here I am more than twenty years later and I feel regret that I didn't make an honest effort to settle down where I was - to go out and make more friends away from work, to do a better job of finding a love life, stuff like that - because it added into my lack of a social life that affects me still.

And that's just me, and that's me being selfish when this day we need to remember the people we left behind.

What the world was going into 2001 was a lot different than the world we are now in 2023. We've been into and out of troubling wars that did nothing to resolve the political woes of the post-Cold War and in some respects made them worse across the Middle East and Europe. Our nation seems to have gone into this mental fugue state were we don't even talk about what we'd done in Iraq and Afghanistan, unlike the discourse and self-reflection that haunted us in the 1970s over our wreckage in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. There hasn't even been any public discussion about war memorials for those occupations as though we're ashamed to admit we were in those places for 10-20 years, as though our failures to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan can't be mentioned.

It's as though we as a nation are only trying to remember the parts where we alone were the victims of a global tragedy, going through the motions to honor the dead in New York and DC and Pennsylvania and nothing more.

But the things we're remembering about 9/11 are not the things as they were. They're just our folklore now, legends fading into myth. We're not remembering the facts of how we failed ourselves and the world leading up to Bin Laden's attack, and how we're failing now as wars continue to rage across the world from our inability to confront the rage of little men in power.

Welcome to the world that not only Bin Laden wanted, but the world that Bush and Cheney and Halliburton and Putin and a hundred dictators and wannabes wanted. All the things we've become after September 11. It's not how we should be honoring the ones we love.