Always Remember
Making the Calendar Sacred
Yesterday was the 11th of September. But in the iconography of American Civil Religion, it will always be 9/11.
It was the 21st anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the crash in Pennsylvania that was alleged to be headed for the Capital Building. So politicians, media figures, churches, and sports teams make special recognition of the date in moments of remembrance.
It strikes me that we have a certain sanitized remembrance of 9/11. Yes, we know that just shy of 3,000 people died that day. We know that what Mr. Rogers called “the helpers” ran into danger to save many at the cost of their own lives. We celebrate the “git’er done” sentiment of Flight 93. And we remember.
And yet we don’t quite. In a Twitter thread yesterday, Tom Junod pointed out that Facebook wouldn’t let him share The Falling Man account of people jumping from the Towers because “it was too disturbing to tell”. My daughter shared with me this remarkable piece by Bill Grueskin describing his reflections from 2001 and 2002 on life in the Battery Park section of Manhattan, just blocks from Ground Zero. We don’t talk about the long-term health challenges of those survivors who ran into the buildings or who worked on the immense clean-up tasks in the years that followed.1
Perhaps the reason we have such a sanitized view of 9/11 is because we all know the iconic videos of the planes hitting the towers and then the towers crumbling. It’s video that’s easy to trot out every year and give us a visceral reminder of what we felt that terrible morning.2
Reflecting on all this, I found myself wondering what other calendar dates have similar roles in our civic religious life. Some horrible and terrible events we rehearse every year. Others we probably should but rarely do except in passing when the event hits a decadal mark. Contrasting these two types is informative in terms of how our civic consciousness3 works. I’ll consider the former Type A and the latter Type B. Here are categories of dates I’m pondering.
War Related Dates: Pearl Harbor (December 7th, 1941) and D-Day (June 6th, 1945). These are generally Type A dates.4
Assassination of Leaders: John F Kennedy (November 23, 1963), Martin Luther King, Jr. (April 4, 1968), Bobby Kennedy (June 4-5, 1968). Type B dates.5
Space Tragedies: Apollo 1 Fire (February 21, 1967), Challenger Explosion (January 28, 1986). Type B dates.
Economic Disruptions: Wall Street Crash (October 24-29, 1929) began the Great Depression, Lehman Brothers Collapse (September 15, 2008) began the Great Recession. We don’t remember these dates at all.
I’m very likely missing other categories of dates and maybe dates within categories. But even with these dates, it seems to me that the only Type A dates we “celebrate” in America6 are those related to National Honor. Twice that honor was threatened by attack. Once that honor was proven on the beaches of Normandy.7
Here’s the thing: most Americans were not directly affected by the War Dates. We remember them because of real or imagined others. On the other hand, we were all affected by the loss of political leaders and certainly by economic disruptions. Even the space tragedies represent a disruption in American Progress.
Like everybody else, I can remember 9/11 and where I was at the time. I can also remember other events (JFK was my first major memory), all of which had a significant impact on me.
Perhaps its good for us to imbue these dates with a type of sacred quality. But it would also be good for us to consider what that means for our society in contrast to the dates we can’t seem to remember as well.
And we it not for the tireless efforts of Jon Stewart and others, we never would.
For anyone under 27, that’s like the only source of information. For them, it’s a constructed remembrance.
I’m drawing on Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life here and the way in which certain rituals communicate a great deal about shared social values.
I wondered what to do with Memorial Day and Veterans Day, but we treat these more as generic holidays with optional remembrance.
We never remember the date of Malcolm X’s assassination (February 21, 1965)
Other the 4th of July, that loosely fits the category, but is often Another Picnic Holiday.
It’s telling that we have no sacralized dates around Wars in Korea, Iraq, or Afghanistan.
Many ask, why? Why were we attacked? Why do "they" hate us?
Growing up in Mexico, people used to say, that Mexico is far away from heaven and too close to the USA. I remember 9/11 (1973) when the USA led a militar junta overthrowing a democratically elected government in Chile killing more than 3000 people. It didn't look good in Latin-America.
John's post and David's comment are spot on.
We have to reckon with our sins as a nation. Our nation has not championed peace. Our maneuvers have been to maximize our influence in order to obtain resources.
This morning's news indicated that Governor DeSantis flew immigrants to Martha's Vineyard. He's mimicking Gov. Abbott. This is not really about immigrants for either governor--it's about looking tough to their base and maintaining political power. But the real reason most immigrants are streaming toward our borders is that we have destabilized their nations in two ways: (i) intentionally, in some instances, and (ii) unintentionally, as in the climate change we've induced.
The Western US is drying up and I'm afraid the day may come when Americans will be streaming to the Canadian border... perhaps they'll build a wall...