Never forget. It is a phrase on the nation’s lips every year around September 11th. As a country, we look back on the worse attack on American soil in recent history. The attack on the World Trade Centers changed the history of the United States.
As a historian, I appreciate dates and ideas that make us reflect on history. As with many of these sorts of events though, it also becomes clear just how fast our understanding of history can change. While social media was filled with individuals commemorating 9/11, many also used the day to flood the services with memes and stories that either tried to co op the day for political purposes, and further divide the country, or that spread a false national epic of how we as a country all came together.
For many, this has led us to forget a great deal. While we long for September 12th, when all Americans joined together, what we really long for is an idea that never was fully there, that is more a product of nostalgia than of reality. We forget the other half of the story.
While many would join arms to mourn those who lost their lives, and the heroes who sacrificed their all to save those they could, others were using the attack to create more division, and for some, to make a quick buck. Then, there were others who, while they mourned those who perished, also believed that the US had such an attack coming, that the country somehow deserved it.
In the days after the 9/11 attacks, various businesses would begin to price gouge. Even in small towns in North Dakota, where I lived at the time, gas stations and a few other businesses helped create additional panic by shooting up the price of fuel. Numerous lawsuits would eventually follow.
Others would go on to lie about how they survived the Twin Tower attacks, such as Alicia Esteve Head, also known as Tania Head. Head would later become the president of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network, as she wound up front and center as a “survivor.” Yet at the time of the attacks, she was an ocean away, in her native city of Barcelona.
She would not be the only one to tell such a lie. Another famous case was Steve Rannazzisi, who later starred on the FXX show, “The League.” He would retell his tale of surviving the collapse of the World Trade Center, which he claimed motivated him to move to California and jump start his career as a comedian. Both would go on living that lie, of being a survivor, for over a decade.
Then, there were the conspiracy theories that sprouted up, and continue to grow today. In the days that followed the attack, conspiracy theories of how the United States faked the attacks, or manufactured the attacks quickly began to circulate. That the towers were rigged up with explosives to take them down, that the Pentagon was actually hit with a missile, or that nano thermite was somehow involved quickly kicked up a storm.
That the US sacrificed hundreds of its own citizens for some nefarious purpose, such as to wage a war against Saddam Hussein, would be promoted heavily, even allowing a few individuals to really kick of their own careers among conspiracy theorists.
But it was not just among the fringe that these ideas took hold. They largely became mainstream as people wanted a reason why we could have been attacked. How could the mightiest nation on earth be attacked so severely by a backwoods group of terrorists? For some, it was inconceivable. For others, it simply was too frightening. That some sort of US cabal was at the center of the attacks, while disheartening, still provided some comfort as it answered the question why better than the official narrative.
As we continue to move further away from the events of 9/11, and a whole new generation has lived, detached from the events, those theories have gained even more traction. The reason is because with time, many do forget. With time, it becomes easier to distance ourselves from those events, allowing for conspiracy theories to gain better hold.
However, there is also more to it. Simply, our memories are flawed. As we retrieve those memories about 9/11, we also reprocess them, and in time, change them. Other information is added to our recollections, and certain things are brushed off. Our reality changes, and we fall victim to the passing of time. That is not to say that our memories cannot be trusted at all, as we do retain the gist. But we also must be aware of how time changes how we remember various events.
Nostalgia is also a very powerful tool when it comes to us remembering the past, or forgetting it. It helps lull us into the grass is greener fallacy, where a fantasy of a bygone time is created in opposition to our own current reality. Today we face an ever-growing division in the country, so we create a past in which the nation joined as one.
Ironically, as many lament this growing divide, they also continue to add to it. As memes flooded social media around the anniversary of 9/11, many could not help but to use it as just one more political opportunity. As they claimed how they wanted that unity that they remembered on September 12, 2001, they did so by blaming the division on “others.”
Blame was heaped on Democrats, as well as Republicans. Some pointed at centrists or moderates. Other’s pointed to football players, or athletes in general. And the ever-present boogeyman, either the communist or socialist, also received a healthy dose of blame as well.
However, that nostalgia, that idea of unity, does not have to go to waste. We do not have to look to some golden age, or a bygone time in order to achieve a togetherness that many of us want. As Ghandi famously said, we can be the change we want to see in this world.
We have the opportunity to close the division that exists in our country. We do not need an event like 9/11 to achieve such. Instead, we just need understanding, and most of all, respect. We must accept that others have different views, and different ideas. We may disagree with them, but we can do so civilly.
Part of that is simply having open discussions, so we can see where others are coming from. That means we must drop the insults, and the portrayal of those who disagree as some kind of “other” that is less. It will take work, but together we can find that unity so many deeply desire.
