As 9/11 decade ends, memory becomes potent word


SHANKSVILLE, Pa. (AP) — One simple notion. Here, some version of it appears on most everything you see — sewn into ballcaps, lovingly painted upon stones, scrawled on sheets of paper. “Never forget.” “Remember the fallen.” “Always in our hearts.” The words vary, but the meaning stays the same.

Before Flight 93 fell from the sky, this patch of southwestern Pennsylvania was a farmer’s field, then a strip mine. Then something happened, something unimaginable and unwelcome, national and global. And this place became a place of memory.

Now it is an expanse of informal remembrance — not only of those lost, but of those left behind trying to make sense, nearly a decade later, of the unprocessable.

The memories of Sept. 11, 2001 — the national memories, the institutional ones, the strands of story already sewn into the American tapestry — are, at decade’s end, setting into dry cement. A generation has grown into early adulthood since it happened. They know it only from stories and photos and video.

This is what they know:

They know our national narrative now contains words that, a decade ago, were strangers. Ground Zero. The Homeland. Jihad. Al-Qaida. WMD and IED and PTSD. And of course the ones that echo here, in Somerset County’s biting wind, the ones that made a legend: “Let’s roll.”

They know the story as it has been told and retold. That we were attacked unjustly, without provocation. That outsiders attacked our cities, our monuments to commerce and defense, and killed fellow citizens who powered the American engine. And that, when they rammed a plane into the Pennsylvania earth, the intruders attacked everyday America, too. They knocked us down, but we got up, rolled up our sleeves and endured.

Together, these memories, a blend of truth and resilience and wishful thinking, offer comfort in the new age of terrorism. They chart not only the recent past but the path ahead. As we clench collectively against another attack, they whisper to us that the American fighter is defined not by the knocking down but by the getting back up.

Memory, of course, is not neutral. Not with 9/11, and not ever, really. It is political, contentious and prone to the power plays of both the deeply involved and the annoyingly distant. Personally and nationally, we remember what we choose, what assuages us and energizes us. “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December,” J.M. Barrie, the man who dreamed up Peter Pan, once wrote.

But here, at the Flight 93 Temporary Memorial, the flavor of memory is different for now because of that word in the middle — “temporary.”

At the dawn of a new decade, it is the antithesis of a closed book. It is incomplete, unfinished, and by being that way it brings 9/11 to its visitors, right here, right now.

Somehow this temporary outpouring, this uniquely American installation of emotion-turned-folk art, feels closer to our ordeal than anything permanent ever could. There is only raw memory, legend’s building blocks.

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