Why Your Children Won’t Remember 9/11
Eli Saslow of the Washington Post has penned a nice piece titled, “9/11 as a Lesson, Not a Memory”. As ITA co-founder Paul Musgrave reminded me, the piece is reminiscent of an article by Musgrave which was first published years ago in Hoosier Review, a now defunct publication of Indiana University. For your reading pleasure I have reprinted the piece here:
Why your children won’t remember
September 11, a year laterSYNOPSIS: Part of a special edition of HR, this article looks at 9/11 in historical perspective.
It is difficult to imagine the world in thirty years, when our children will be college-aged. Some things seem inevitable: India and China will be more important in world politics, Japan and Western Europe less critical. Sub-Saharan Africa will be poorer, while Eastern Europeans will be as wealthy as West Germans today. Other things are more doubtful. Gene therapy will probably be commonplace, and artificial intelligence — smarter, perhaps, than humans — may be a reality. The oceans may have risen a few inches, and oil might run out. Some events, completely unforeseen today, will shape the world our children will study in their entry-level college courses — if universities still exist.
One thing the next generation won’t study will be September 11.
September 11 is a turning point in history. No one doubts that. But so was the Spanish Civil War, and who today remembers Franco? In a hundred years, if humans still exist, some historian may write a book proving that the world really changed in 2001 on a bright September day when Islamic fundamentalists destroyed the World Trade Center in the former United States. Or the dominant narrative may be completely different, tracing the darker ages to some event we don’t
see today — the bombing in Beirut, for example, or the establishment of the House of Saud.But the next generation won’t remember September 11.
They won’t remember because there will never be a “next thing,” no other incident that so clearly fits into a story that everyone remembers it. In that case, September 11 will be like the influenza epidemic of 1918: important, critical, unforgettable if you lived through it, but unremembered by everyone else. The other case is that there will be a next thing. Then September 11 will be the Japanese bombing of the U.S.S. Panay — important, prophetic, unforgettable if you were there, but overshadowed by the next part of the story.
The next generation won’t remember September 11.
They will remember April 28, or October 14, or February 6. They will remember the destruction of New York, or the killing of the 112th Congress, or the gassing of Berlin. They will visit the memorial to Los Angeles, or watch videos of the rebuilding of Beijing, or read of the Israeli-Egyptian nuclear conflict. Or they’ll skip over the boring parts in their textbooks about the early years of the Bush administration.
But they won’t remember September 11.
All content printed above copyright 2002, 2003, 2004 Paul Musgrave.
4 Responses to “Why Your Children Won’t Remember 9/11”
You could compare it with the sack of Baltimore in 1631. Baltimore, Ireland, that is. Des Eskin, the author of “The Stolen Village : Baltimore and the Barbary pirates” describes it as “the most devastating invasion ever carried out by the forces of the Islamist jihad on Britain or Ireland” and says it “was recognized at the time as an unprecedented act of aggression by the Islamist empire.”
I’ll bet most people have forgotten about it. I hadn’t even heard of it until recently, even though we visited Baltimore 10 years ago. I vaguely remember seeing the O’Driscoll castle ruins, but tonight had to look at my wife’s snapshot collection to remind me of what it had looked like. (Too much Guinness at the time, maybe.)
I just started reading the book. My daughter gave it to me on 9/11. I think that date had more to do with my birthday than the attack on New York, though.
The author’s invoking of the spectre of jihad may be more for the sake of book sales than anything else. So far it doesn’t sound quite like the jihad that felled the Twin Towers. But it also sounds like the event was very traumatic at the time, and not only for those who lived in Baltimore.
Thanks for re-posting this.
[...] Joshua Claybourn at In The Agory has posted an article titled “Why Your Children Won’t Remeber 9/11“. [...]
Interesting thoughts by Paul. However, I disagree that 9/11 will become and obscure historical event within a generation. I think that it will be remembered in a similar way to the Kennedy assassination. Even though that occurred when my father was in grade school, I’m very much aware of it as a significant event in American history.
On the other hand, if Islamic terrorism becomes a bigger problem than it is now, 9/11 could end up being remembered like Pearl Harbor (not the bombing of the Panay).