The Yankee Remembers

It's impossible not to know when this date rolls around. For days before, sometimes weeks, the media barrages us with stories and documentaries about that awful day 11 years ago. When I awoke this morning I noted, as did many others, that the weather was pretty much the same as it was 11 years ago, and that it was also a Tuesday. I'd overslept that morning, and as I got ready for work I heard the traffic report about a plane hitting one of the towers of the World Trade Center. Details were sketchy, and the reports of those first few minutes said nothing about a jet. I was on the way to work when I heard reports of the second plane. Immediately I knew it was no coincidence and no accident. Not long after that came the news of the plane hitting the Pentagon and eventually about the plane going down in Pennsylvania.

The company I worked for had temporary employees on assignment with companies in the Towers. Employees of our New York office watched helplessly from their conference room further uptown. When one of my friends emailed me that one of the Towers had collapsed. At first I thought he was kidding.

He wasn't.

It was days before we tracked down all of our employees assigned in the Towers.

It was days before I heard from people I knew at the Pentagon.

Each year on the anniversary the nation's attention focuses on what happened to and in the Towers. We hear surviors' stories and the stories of victim's families over and over again. We hear about the upcoming memorials around Ground Zero and across the country. Memorials from Ground Zero are televised. Throughout all of this comes the occasional afterthought.

Oh,yeah, one plane hit the Pentagon.

Oh, and there were those passengers who heroically fought their hijackers and kept their plane from hitting its intended target.

After 10 years of remembrances in the vicinity of New York City it is a different experience being literally less than six miles from the Pentagon on this 11th anniversary. The stories I hear are tinged with a sense of the panic people felt here that was very different from what people felt in New York City. There was a much greater sense of waiting for the next attack to come, which is understandable given the large number of military bases and offices in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. Not to mention federal offices, the Capitol, and the White House.

Yet even here, the majority of the media coverage focuses mostly on the events in New York City. The images of the Towers burning and collapsing are iconic. The empty field in Pennsylvania doesn't hold the same visual impact. Photos of the downed jet look much like any other air crash. The Pentagon was not catastrophically destroyed, and it was a military target as opposed to a civilian one.

Eventually the events of 11 years ago will fade into history and myth joining, among others, the attack on Pearl Harbor that occurred 71 years ago, the sinking of the Lusitania 97 years ago, and the sinking of the Maine 113 years ago. Like those events, the historical, social, and political contexts of 9/11 will be simplified or glossed over in our cultural retelling. Like those events, 9/11's primacy in our cultural memory will be replaced by some new catastrophe or attack.

Until then, we remember.