Remembering ten years ago

Remembering ...

I wrote this ten years ago today. Unlike everything else on this page, it is not "crap" at all:

"As any history professor will tell you, people don't much care for the minutiae of dates. Yesterday morning, most Americans could identify only three by heart.

Now there will be four.

July 4, 1776

December 7, 1941

November 22, 1963

September 11, 2001

Our thoughts are with the victims, and the families of the victims. The most frightening thing for everyone is that we can all imagine ourselves or our loved ones in their places with only the slightest change in circumstances. Far too many of us don't have to imagine at all, because we are among the aggrieved."

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Ten years later, I also think about the first responders and all the hard workers who sorted through the ruins, carted off the rubble, and got New York functioning again. They are the hidden victims of 9/11. Many of them paid for their efforts with their lives, some immediately, others more slowly from working for months in contaminated conditions.

Reader comment:

Thank you for your personal your comments on 9/11. Very well-expressed (as always).

I just wanted to note that if you did point out on 9/11 that that date would go down in history you were truly prescient. (Again, as always). I well remember how long it took people to find a term to express the occurrence, and how it was at least two weeks or more later before people started noticing the exact date at all.

The experience this time was entirely different from the 8th of December 1941, when President Roosevelt referred to the preceding day as one which would live in infamy, as it has.

The differing 9/11 experience was brilliantly encapsulated for me in a speech made on the floor of the Senate by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, about a week after, broadcast on C-Span-2, where she stated that 'No one alive today will forget where they were on the 12th of September 2011'. About 3 or 4 times she refers to the tragedy of 'September the 12th'. No one corrects her. Nor does she realize her mistake. It simply hadn't sunk into people's consciousness yet what the exact date of the tragedy was.

As for me, I've entirely forgotten where I was on the 12th of September.


Scoop's reply:

I had completely forgotten that progression of events! Thanks for the reminder.

I didn't foresee HOW the date would become memorable, that the words "nine-eleven" would become embedded into our brains as a political mantra. I guess we have Rudy Giuliani to thank for that, but maybe that's an unfair assumption on my part, because I don't really remember when it all started.

I have no idea what I did on September 12, but I remember being relieved to wake up that day with the realization that there would be no more mass attacks after the original hijackings.

If I was indeed completely lucky to be right about the date being seared in our consciousness, at least my forecast was right in the very broadest sense, in that the attacks on the Twin Towers do correspond in my mind to the events of November 22, 1963. I can remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first heard about the attacks, just as I can remember all the personal details about the day JFK was shot.