What We Forget When We Remember 9/11

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Forgetting is part of the process, too. As memory scholar Paul Connerton has argued, some forms of forgetting are not failures but necessary parts of social life.

No individual, school or nation can keep everything equally present forever. History accumulates faster than collective memory can accommodate it. The question, then, is not whether Americans will forget parts of 9/11. They will. The more interesting question is what remains after that forgetting takes place.

From the first anniversary, commemorating the attacks has carried a careful choreography. There is the annual reading of the names of those who died, the memorial lights and the stories of first responders, each of which keeps the human loss and courage of the day in view.

In a 2016 Pew Research Center survey, 76% of Americans named 9/11 as one of the 10 most consequential events of their lifetimes. Nearly 1 in 5 said the nation's immediate response to the attacks was the moment when they felt most proud of the United States.

I understand those points of view. Some of what I most want preserved about Sept. 11 is the shared grief of those first days and the ways ordinary people revealed their humanity under unimaginable circumstances.

Firefighters climbed stairs and ran toward mortal danger, while a cascade of people tried as hard as they could to get down. Office workers helped colleagues and strangers. Families searched for missing loved ones long after hope had become terribly thin.

And passengers on United Flight 93 fought back and forced the plane they were on to crash in a field in the middle of Pennsylvania, sacrificing themselves in the hopes of saving others.

Before 9/11 became a justification, a policy, a war or a political symbol, it was an experience of shared human vulnerability.

Politics and its consequences

No event remains sealed inside its original meaning. Sept. 11 became the starting point for a series of political choices that reshaped American life and, in turn, reshaped the memory of the day itself.

The attacks led to the war in Afghanistan, which lasted for 20 years after the invasion's initial success in dismantling al-Qaida and removing the Taliban government. Next was the invasion of Iraq, even though Saddam Hussein's regime had no role in 9/11.

And the aftermath of the attacks helped create an atmosphere that allowed for expanding government surveillance, enlarging presidential power and narrowing the space for dissent. Muslim Americans found themselves subjected to new suspicion and hostility.

Those consequences now compete with the original experience of Sept. 11 for a place in its meaning.

For some Americans, the attacks have become inseparable from the wars and broader official willingness to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of security that followed. From this perspective, 9/11 is remembered not only as a national trauma but also as a warning about how fear and grief can make policies that once seemed unthinkable appear necessary.

For others, the day – and its aftermath – represent restored American pride and military perseverance. For still others, 9/11 remains most powerfully a story about innocent lives lost and ordinary people behaving with extraordinary courage.

Each way of remembering draws a boundary around the terrorism the nation experienced, deciding how far beyond that September morning its meaning should extend.

Even events once regarded as world-defining eventually have to share the historical landscape with everything that follows. Since 2001, Americans have experienced Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis, the election of the first Black president, the rise of Donald Trump, the violence on January 6, 2021, and a global pandemic.

September 11 has not become unimportant because those things happened. Its place in the story has changed because life – because the world – kept going.

For people who were alive during the attacks, there is something sad about watching that distance and diminishment happen. When an event once remembered in minute detail becomes a date others know only from history, the passage of one's own life becomes newly visible.

There is a strange nostalgia in realizing that something once so immediate now belongs increasingly to people who know it only as the past.