Having been criticized for not taking a more “hard-line” stance on 9/11, the subject has been on my mind again lately. The history of that interaction can be traced starting here and continuing in this thread.
Whatever my point was originally, thinking on the subject has lately been more concrete, trying to discuss the same questions from another angle. I talked recently about the fact that there is no significant 9/11 monument taking the place of the empty void of Ground Zero. I know we may have potentially other, bigger fish to fry as a culture – what with the world economy crashing and all – but it’s an interesting subject. And to me, it boils down to the public debate over meaning. The fact that “we as a culture” don’t have a memorial for a traumatic event in the public consciousness means that maybe we haven’t as a culture sat down and gotten together about what this event “means” to us as a people. To some of us, it means something VERY very different than it does to others. The definitive universal opinion seems to be that something very bad happened that day and that we should “never forget.”
What it is that we shouldn’t be forgetting, however, is difficult to remember without some kind of significant cultural marker to tell us how we’re supposed to feel about it. That’s what a symbol does, that’s what a memorial does: gives us a fixed face for our emotions to be focused on and a ground against which they can be potentially resolved, healed and transcended.
In other cultures moreso than in the American (although it’s not wholly absent), monument sites become places of religious devotion and spiritual dedication, holy places which people are compelled to go to visit at least once in their lives as part of a pilgrimage. Can a symbol of violent national trauma become a cathartic healing point and place of reverence to something bad that happened and that we can eventually get over – no matter who you believe caused it, or why or what should be done about the event “9/11″ itself?
Something like that might become a rallying point for people viewing the world from many different perspectives, a place of peace where they can come together as community members to express themselves and come to understand one another’s lives in a real, immediate and lasting way.
There are, of course, a lot of other ways of looking at 9/11, other things people say can or should be done about it. This is by no means meant to be definitive, just my view of it from the window.
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6 Comments
Relevant to the monument/form concept
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2004.../infinity-idolatry-the-need-for-form/
My understanding is that if you visit Pearl Harbor you’ll find a deeply moving memorial to passed soldiers and sailors. And, if you visit Hiroshima you’ll get the same thing but honoring civilians. I don’t know why we need to do this but it is some elemental human activity. I’d really like to know why we do this for things that happen in a flash but not for ongoing, centuries long, ethnic conflicts. Those kill more people.
It has something to do with the need to contain taboos, I think. There’s a relevant quote floating around here somewhere… Some French philosopher who was saying something to the effect of religion as being a protection against God.
Religions, when they first start out, are ways of describing, interpreting, and eventually making sense of what was before unknowable. They are ways of approaching the unknown and bringing it into our awareness, of trying to make peace with God, so to speak.
I think that we don’t want to make peace with what 9-11 means, but we won’t have a meaningful memorial until we do. We have to want to be healed before we can hope for any kind of catharsis. I think a lot of people want to keep that wound fresh, for many different reasons.
Why don’t we want to know what 9/11 means?
I think people don’t want to put 9/11 behind them, and that to agree on what 9/11 means would be the first step toward moving on. It’s kind of similar to AA (Hi, my name’s America, and I’ve been attacked) or the stages of grief (you have to get beyond the denial and anger to begin processing the grief).
Whether it’s because it’s the only real things that’s happened to us (as pointed out in the movie Short Bus and the Forbidden thoughts about 9/11 articles on Salon that Ran Prieur posted), or because forgetting about 9/11 would let the terrorists win (a monument wouldn’t stop this, I suppose, but it’s still a reason to hold onto the hurt) or because it makes makes easy to keep up the ongoing war on terror (my money’s on that last one as the root of it all, unless it’s something deeper), there is a mass movement to avoid processing 9/11. We will continue to hold onto it until it becomes so removed from reality that we are forced to either let it go or go down with the ship, so to speak. It’s our great white whale.