9/11 - Public vs Private Mourning

It is the sixth anniversary of the dreadful events of 9/11/2001. Tributes will be paid to those who lost their lives on that day. Families will grieve, politicians will posture and the nation will remember. What is the appropriate manner of commemorating the fateful day that set the course for how we think of security at home and abroad? For how long do we need to personalize the memories of those who lost their lives? Columnist Froma Harrop argues that while it is understandable for family members of the victims to grieve the loss of loved ones, others can step back.

Public Tires of 9-11 Tributes

How to remember Sept. 11 has set off a hard debate. Many who lost loved ones in the terrorist attacks are demanding that the mass grieving and reading of names remain a national ritual. Others, however, want to lower the volume and make the remembrance more about the event than the 2,880 individuals who died as a result.

It was inevitable that even for a horror like Sept. 11, the edge would wear off. Six years have passed.

This argument says a lot about America's modern culture of public mourning. Roadside memorials pop up at sites of fatal traffic accidents. Parents whose children died from violence or disease try to place memorials in town centers — right next to plaques with names of soldiers who perished in war.

Not everyone likes this trend. And in the case of the 9-11 survivors, some families seem to have crossed a line into self-dramatization and an unseemly money chase based on what they consider their unique grief.....

..... Perhaps some of the survivors have become addicted to the extraordinary amount of attention that's come their way. They've lost perspective on the significance of their sorrows, relative to those of others.

Some 9-11 survivors understand that, at some point, their loss is no longer communal. "The grieving part has to become more personal," Lesli Rice, whose mother died in the attacks, told The New York Times. "The whole city wasn't affected by my mother's death."

Untimely death visits most families. While the 9-11 victims perished in an especially spectacular manner, their survivors, in the end, must swim in the same vale of tears as everyone else. They may always grieve their loss, but the public has the right to move on.

How do readers feel?  Is Harrop being heartless?  Should lives lost on 9/11 occupy a unique place in our collective memory? With passing of time, is it enough to commemorate an event rather than the individuals inadvertently caught up in it?

Comments

[Dean C. Rowan]

The similarly themed piece cited by Harrop from the New York Times includes a range of views on perennial public commemoration. I share the opinion of the 27-year-old from New Jersey, who finds that the events have become "crassly corporatized and co-opted by false patriots." In this respect, September 11 changed little (make that, nothing) of the cynicism that impels commercial and political America.

There is something, too, to the remarks from a history professor that close the article. Eventually, much of the event and its twisted legacy will be forgotten, which reminds us that we are presently guilty of neglecting comparably horrific tragedies with which we feel no connection.

[Ruchira Paul]

(Couldn't open the NYT piece you linked to - Times Subscription only)

On the last day of my vacation I read with some interest this NYT article by Susan Faludi. Entirely co-incidentally, just the day before, my daughter had presented me with this T-shirt.

Myths are okay as long as we learn the right lessons from our trauma. As Faludi points out towards the end of her essay:

The founders of our country were steeped in the experience of Metacom’s Rebellion. In the Revolutionary era, Rowlandson herself had a curtain call as an American icon: her book was reissued in the 1770s and once again achieved popularity, along with the narratives of a number of other women who had endured trials in the embattled wilderness. It was in these very times, with recent knowledge of domestic attack, that our founders expanded, not contracted, the concept of democracy, authoring the very liberties we have been tempted to renounce in our own time of “troubles.”

If the polls recording widespread disenchantment with the Iraq war and the Bush administration’s performance are any indication, we may finally — a half-dozen years after 9/11 — be prepared to ask some hard questions about our response. That suggests we may be at a moment of clarity and, hence, of great possibility. By returning us to the trauma that produced our national myth, the 9/11 attacks present the opportunity to look past the era of buckskin bravado and unlock the cabinet wherein lies America’s deepest formative fear, the fear of home-soil terrorism.

One ultimate casualty of Metacom’s Rebellion was the Puritans’ determination to face that fear. By revisiting our ancient drama, 9/11 gives us a chance to regain that abandoned resolve, to see our frailties in a realistic light, instead of papering them over with dangerous delusions.