9/11 and the Task of History

Back when I was a in college, history majors had a regular friendly debate about how long something had to be in the past to count as “history.” If asked the same question today, I would suggest that the difference lies in learning about what happened while we were alive and what happened before we were born. This means that history is a tide that slowly rolls over the generations until we hit a point where the only connection we have to the past is the voices of those who have themselves passed on. Perhaps that’s when we can start to say that an event is truly history, but the process began much earlier.

We haven’t reached that point with the tragic events of 9/11 yet, but the tide is rising. Almost every college student I teach today was born into a post-9/11 world. Every fall, I find myself on the front lines of the task of history, wrestling with how to convey the story of this tragic event. Through this, I’ve gained a new appreciation for the nature and role of history as we seek to situate events like this into our collective identity, and I think we can learn important lessons from this about who we are and who we hope to be.

 “Where were you when…”

While I can teach students the details of the 9/11 attacks, its precursors, and what lessons we learned from it, I can’t replicate one of the most important aspects of that that: what it felt like. How do you possibly convey what it felt like to turn on the TV that morning, hearing about a remarkable plane crash, only to watch a second plane barrel into the towers? How can I really explain what it felt like to spend the day at school listening to the radio in class as even my teachers struggled to sort through what it all meant and whether there were more attacks coming? The fear and sense of violation that permeated those days would galvanize a nation into a collective expression of patriotism that is alien to my students’ experience. It spurred military action and a reappraisal of our priorities in the homeland that defined a generation, but that was not my students’ generation.

Maybe the closest I can come is to find other events that have etched themselves into our memories so sharply that we can all remember where we were when we first saw or heard about them. For some of my older students, Covid 19 might fit the bill. For my more conservative students, Charlie Kirk’s assassination likely does. Neither is the same thing. Covid lacks the graphic visual of watching the world change and the closest to a discrete incident might be asking when you first heard things were closing down. Kirk’s death didn’t affect everyone as broadly and hardly unified us at a national level. 

At the same time, these sorts of events are events in the strong sense of the term. They shape our collective identity by demanding our focus for weeks, months, or even years. They also share a similar rhythm, generating a passionate desire not to let history repeat itself and, unfortunately, producing blind spots as our attention remains laser focused for an extended period. 

The desire not to let history repeat itself can manifest in both positive and negative ways. On the negative side, we can end up always fighting the last war. While we certainly shouldn’t leave ourselves vulnerable, terrorists are much less likely to try to hijack planes in a repeat performance of 9/11 if simply because the surprise factor is gone. When Richard Reid tried to detonate a pair of shoes a few months later, we had to take our shoes off to pass through security for the next 20+ years. For all its expense, it’s not clear that the TSA has ever stopped a terrorist, although they have been effective in catching guns, drugs, and those pernicious 5-ounce toothpaste tubes. 

On the positive side, this desire not to let history repeat itself led to a number of commonsense improvements in security—like reinforced cockpits and scanning for luggage—that have been much more effective. The event more broadly also created a sense of common cause and unity that lasted for years afterward. 

Of a more mixed record were the numerous major government overhauls. I still think the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were justified based on our intelligence at the time, even if there were numerous operational and intelligence failures that later blighted both operations. The PATRIOT Act empowered the government to more effectively work together in a number of important ways that improved efforts to foil both terrorist plots and other criminal enterprises. At the same time, it entailed several provisions that strain the boundaries of the government’s proper role with respect to important individual rights like privacy. Finally, the complete reorganization and creation of the Department of Homeland Security created both efficiencies and chaos that are still not completely resolved. 

These latter examples also highlight the pattern for growing blind spots to develop. The laser focus on counterterrorism was directly responsible for a degradation in the readiness of FEMA and a loss of investment in the sort of preparedness that might have mitigated the Hurricane Katrina disaster. The international realignment around the war on terror also helped nations fall into patterns of relationship familiar to those raised in the Cold War. In particular, we tended to overlook the serious problems with our allies in ways that hampered our efforts and laid a groundwork for future instabilities. As one example, it would take a decade to find Osama bin Laden hiding within the borders of one of our purported allies. For a time, we were willing to write a check for nearly anything to nearly anyone so long as it was billed as “counterterrorism.” 

Learning our Lesson

So, what broader lesson can this teach us about how we approach history in the making? First, we can see that these events will naturally pull our focus in a sustained way that the 24-hour news cycle struggles to replicate. This often creates an action window where cooperation can break through our constant legislative deadlock in a way that is too often impossible. This fosters a political opportunism that is both understandable and grounds for concern. I don’t fault the desire to do something about the situation, but the irony is that the attention that so closely follows the event often skims over the details of the actions we take. Doing something feels great, but there’s probably no more important time to scrutinize the details of what we’re actually doing. 

Second, we should give an event time to breathe. What I mean by this is that we often rush to weave a major event into our preexisting narratives when their very nature is to push the edges of those narratives. Part of the failure of 9/11 was a failure to understand Muslim extremism. For bin Laden, a veteran of the Afghan resistance to the Soviet Union, the attacks presented a chance to spend a few hundred thousand dollars to force the United States to spend hundreds of billions, hopefully destabilizing us both economically and politically as we cracked under the pressure of a sustained conflict. His bet was that 9/11 would be a push that eventually caused the United States itself to topple. He was at least partly right in terms of the relative costs, and to the degree that we can trace a line from the post-attack unity to the radical disunity that has afflicted us since, the jury is still out on his broader aims. Either way, it’s a grave mistake to reduce bin Laden’s aim down to “destroy America” as if his plan to hit the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and Capitol would have made us wave the white flag in surrender. 

I see the same patterns happening with other major events since that time. Covid was quickly woven into broader narratives that were less about dealing with the uncertainty of a serious disease and more about the pathological stupidity of our political rivals. Kirk’s assassination was quickly absorbed into preexisting narratives that prevented progressives from mourning with those who mourn and caused conservatives to write off the reality of right-wing violence. Sometimes we’re so sure about what message we want to pass to future generations, but we’re almost always better coming back to reassess that question after the dust has settled a bit. I don’t think we wait until all the eyewitnesses are dead, but there’s a reason why the more sober judgment of history takes its time. 

Developing a Pedagogy of Lament

What do we do in the meantime? There’s nothing wrong with teaching students about the events of 9/11, but what I’m really longing to do is not about getting them to memorize facts. Instead, I want to invite them into a certain sort of cultural memory. Events like this are deeply shaping for the generations that experience them, and the real question with the rise of a new generation is how we can invite our children and children’s children to shape themselves through it, too.

The ultimate task is actually more about our embodiment, about taking into ourselves a sense of the weight of history that lets us feel the lessons it has to teach us, rather than just recite them. This is a call to lament, and the best way to explore this sort of event is to develop a pedagogy that recognizes that purpose.

I can still remember the first time I visited the World War II memorial in Washington, DC. I remember looking at a wall full of stars and realizing that each one of the over 4,000 stars represented 100 dead soldiers. It’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the immensity of the human cost of that conflict when you realize the immensity of this display is compounded 100 times over. 

I can also remember an opportunity I had one of the years I was in Washington D.C. to walk from the Pentagon into Washington, walking the opposite way across the bridges that so many citizens of DC had to fearfully cross that day. 

There are so many other examples, from stairclimbing challenges to remember the 110 flights of stairs that firefighters climbed to placing thousands of American flags in a stretch of grass to symbolize the souls lost on that day. Each one invites participants into a living, embodied memory of the event that reshaped our nation. 

Ultimately, this is the most powerful way to teach those events that make history, by finding ways to bring those events just a little closer to our lived experience. This is the lesson that has shaped the Christian community for generations, from the detailed structure of Israelite holy days to the simplicity of the bread and wine. Modern life is defined by its eagerness for the future, we so quickly cast off our history and press into what lies ahead, but this is not how we were made to be. Pedagogies of lament and remembrance help to ground us in our history and forge a connection that can cross generations of experience. They anchor the significance of events in ways that recitations of facts and even well-told stories struggle to do. For other teachers out there trying to think through how to teach about 9/11, for parents struggling with how to connect the shared experience of generations, for anyone seeking to embed themselves in the collective memory of their heritage, we should not neglect the importance of our embodiment in this task.

This essay was adapted from an article in the In All Things archives. The original essay was published on September 11, 2016.