The Work of Remembering 9/11 is Different by @AmSolidarity
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The commemorations of 9/11 feel especially odd this year. Perhaps because it's only starting to feel like history.
What happened that day changed everything for those who witnessed it, but now a whole generation has grown up who didn't.
So the work of remembering is different.
As we try to make sense of those terrible events and convey it to future generations, lots of us are reminded of one of the few good things about them: the sense that Americans had that they were united, that they were all part of a common cause. Solidarity, in other words.
It was, perhaps, inevitable for that feeling not to last. It's human nature to come together in times of external threat (Ronald Reagan used to wonder aloud about whether an alien invasion would bring world peace). But time marches on and new concerns and disagreements arise.
But the period of national unity and goodwill in the face of tragedy does throw into sharp relief how little of that we sometimes seem to have today.
For the past year and a half we've been experiencing an even deadlier national tragedy (albeit one that's more diffuse, quieter, and with no visible enemy).
And we're more divided and hostile toward one another than we've been in a very long time.
There's plenty of blame to go around for how we got here.
Some of it is the way our leaders leveraged that sense of unity in the years after 9/11, when they told themselves they could make Americans safer not just by going to war but by remaking the Middle East at gunpoint.
Meanwhile at home we increasingly seemed less capable of taking care of own. Katrina threw that into sharp relief.
The hollowing-out of the middle class (which had been building for a long time) was becoming more and more apparent. And then the hammerblow of 2008 came.
Obama's election gave many people (not just progressives) a temporary sense that a fundamental course correction was possible, and that we might get some of that sense of national solidarity back.
That didn't last either.
We very slowly dug ourselves out of the Great Recession, but untold numbers of lives and communities were wrecked in ways they would never fully recover from. Overreach abroad continued. Cultural and political polarization worsened.
Something seemed to snap in the national psyche sometime in Obama's 2nd term, much of it dealing with polarization around race. We were running out of patience with each other, increasingly seeing our politics as a cold civil war between fundamentally incompatible opposites.
Then we got a most unusual presidency: one that, from the very beginning, did not even make a pretense of attempting to unify the country.
And lots of Americans embraced that, because they were so alienated both from what ordinary politics had become and from other Americans.
But for all of his inflammatory nature, Trump was in many ways more a symptom than a cause. And that's why the people who hoped Biden would bring a return to a more normal and even boring way of doing politics are probably wrong.
And to be honest, we sometimes even wonder if (God forbid) some catastrophe on the scale of 9/11 happened today, whether we would see another outpouring of patriotism… or just another partisan circus of mutual blame and hatred.
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