OUR VIEW: After nine years, have we forgotten?

Sept. 11, 2010 began like any other Saturday morning in Logan. I got up, I walked down to Main Street, and I got coffee. I chatted with the regulars at the shop, making light-hearted jokes between sips of vanilla hazelnut, and boasted about how well the Aggies would play in the football game later that evening.

    At some point that morning the clock struck 8:46. I don’t remember where I was or what I was doing. Walking somewhere around Logan, the memory of the 2,977 souls crying out in terror that morning nine years ago – only to cease an instant later – was lost on me. A blue sky yielded no sign of melancholy. A bright sun gave no hint of tragedy.

    I had forgotten, and I had forgotten despite having vowed never to do so.

They call us the 9/11 generation. A single social entity, if one could ever be defined, composed of millions of individuals whose lives will be forever linked with that day and its consequences. They say it changed us – some of us for the better, some of us for the worse. But did it really? They say – and I’ve never quite figured out who ‘they’ are – that we will never forget, but have we really etched the day in our consciousness like they said we would?

    It didn’t occur to me until yesterday morning that I am not that different from the person I was nine years ago. Sure, I am older and presumably more intelligent, but like the proverbial seventh grader I was on 9/11/2001, I walk through life with blinders on. I am awake. I am alive. But I am not living, and certainly not living with the purpose of making this a better world.

    I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. How many of you took the time on Saturday to stop and consider who you’ve become since that day? How many of you, given the pristine Saturday morning, were even awake?

    Next year will be the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and I fear it will be just another measure of how little I’ve come since that day. Maybe it’s time to put aside the rhetoric and to push past the facade of blame-game politics. Maybe it’s time to get to the true meaning of memory, embracing introspection and truly asking ourselves – Have I forgotten?

    Only when we come to a conclusion can we begin to build that world we said we would never allow this kind of tragedy to happen in again.