Twenty-Five Years Later, Remembering 9/11

In “Aftermath,” a 1919 retrospective poem on his war, Siegfried Sassoon asked: “Have you forgotten yet?” “Look up,” he appealed, “and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.”[1] With the approach of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I have been reflecting on that terrible day and how we remember it. Specifically, I was comparing how we recall it with how we recall the only other comparable event in American history: Pearl Harbor. Admittedly, I was only nine years old in 1966 on the 25th anniversary of that attack and have no specific recall of December 7th of that year. But I do have clear memories of the atmosphere of that time and the tone that pervaded Americans’ collective honoring of the courage and sacrifice of those who fought in the Second World War. And I must admit being a bit unsettled by the comparison.Even in an era of rising protest over the war in Vietnam, the vast majority of Americans commemorated the dead from the global conflict that preceded it and honored the veterans of it who walked among them. And perhaps that is part of the difference. Some 12.2 percent out of a total population of about 135 million 135 million—about one in eight Americans—do...