I’m all for remembering, but only as long as remembering is emotionally healthy and oriented to an optimistic future.
About 15 years ago, I met a young man in a civil war museum in Virginia. Unprovoked, he stated that he was angry at “the North” because the North had defeated the South–and his great great great [great?] grandfather had “fought bravely for the South. He was visibly angry as he told me these things. It was pathetic to see someone so consumed and defined the American Civil War. His way of remembering had trapped him in an endless cycle of anger.
In an article in Harper’s Magazine (August 2011) titled “After 9/11: The Limits of Remembrance [1],” David Rieff has expressed concern that many Americans are “remembering” 9/11 in accordance with the official George W. Bush explanation from 2001: We were attacked “because the terrorists hate our freedoms–our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” This form of “remembrance” has no room for any possibility that the attack was provoked, even in part, in response to the constant meddling in the Middle East by the United States, going back at least as far as 1953’s “Operation Ajax [2],” when the U.S. and Great Britain overthrew overthrew the democratically elected leader of Iran as a favor to the oil industry.
[3]If you Google “9/11” and “remember,” you’ll get hundreds of millions of hits. The sort of “remembering” most Americans seem to be doing about 9/11, however, is about “reaffirming of group loyalty rather than the establishing of historical accuracy, let alone the presenting of an event in all its moral and political complexity.” I’m not claiming that all Americans remember 9/11 in this way, but based on many of the websites found in the Google search, this is a common way for Americans to “remember.” Stretching credibility to the breaking point, many Americans remember 9/11 as a conspiracy [4] in which the U.S. was a intentional participant. Rieff warns, “to remember may not just mean to grieve; it may also mean to harbor a vision of securing justice or vengeance long after it is time to put the guns away.”
We do need to remember the people who were killed in the attacks. We need to remember the brave rescuers. But we need to stop being angry at anyone other than those who participated in the attacks, because it is not fair to all Muslims and it is not healthy for us. It’s time for us to carefully rethink how we are remembering the attacks. Are we remembering in a healthy way, or are we trapping ourselves in an endless cycle of anger? Is our way of remembering helping us deal with our future, or is it merely defining us as eternal victims and trapping us in a distorted version of the past? Is our way of “remembering” cranking up bigotry? Is it causing us to engage in needless wars? Is it causing us to dismantle our civil rights in the name of “heightened security”? Is our way of remembering encouraging us to re-engage with the world, or is it making us self-absorbed?
Rieff argues that we need to consider both the benefits and the risks for the types of remembering that we do. “[O]ne has to consider the morally or psychologically unpalatable possibility that at some times and in some contexts forgetting may actually be preferable to remembering.”
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