By Rick Hampson
USA Today
Copyright 2007 USA Today
NEW YORK — Even if you wanted to forget what day it was, you couldn’t. When you write a check or plan a meeting, there it is — printed on the calendar, encoded in time.
You might forget the date Hiroshima was bombed or Kennedy was shot. You can’t forget Sept. 11, the date that shares its name with the catastrophe of 2001.
Is that beginning to change, even as the war the attacks helped to inspire drags on in Iraq?
Tuesday’s sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks that killed almost 3,000 people is unlikely to pack the same emotional clout, generate the same media attention or command the same public focus as the fifth anniversary.
Ground Zero is now a construction site. For the first time, the memorial service for those who died there will be held in a park nearby. WABC-TV in New York initially did not plan to broadcast the reading of all the victims’ names, as it had in previous years, but reversed itself after protests from some victims’ relatives.
Morris County, N.J., which lost about 100 residents on 9/11, has had to postpone enhancing its memorial because fundraising has fallen short — possibly a sign, editorialized the Daily Record of Morristown, that “memories of9/11 are slowly slipping away.”
They’re far from lost. A new videotape featuring Osama bin Laden surfaced over the weekend, a reminder that al-Qaeda continues to target this country.
And in a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday and Saturday, 71% of Americans called 9/11 the most memorable news event of their lifetime. Asked whether 9/11 changed the way they live, 29% said yes — up from 18% five years ago.
However, only 6% said they would observe Tuesday’s anniversary in a formal way, such as attending a memorial event or taking the day off. Most — 71% — said they would mark it informally, perhaps by praying, keeping a moment of silence or watching news coverage. Almost one-quarter said they didn’t plan to observe it at all.
Edward Linenthal, a University of Indiana scholar who has written about memorials in U.S. history, says a certain loss of focus is inevitable on “the in-between anniversaries” whose years don’t end in 5 or 0.
“Like any event, even Pearl Harbor, the more time goes by, the less central it becomes to our experience,” says Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor who studies U.S. popular culture.
“That’s healthy. It becomes more a part of history, less a raw wound.”
Civil War veterans “would be stunned that Memorial Day has become more of a holiday and less of a holy day,” Linenthal says.
“After the World War I generation, Armistice Day faded,” he says. “Most of my undergraduates wouldn’t know what it means.”
Some Americans believe the nation dwells too much on the 9/11 anniversary.
“There’s politicians who are trying to keep it alive,” says Eloise Barnard of Good Thunder, Minn. “It was an unfortunate thing, but it’s time to move on.”
Others worry that if recognition of the attack’s anniversary begins to dwindle, the nation will sink into what New York Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin calls “the business of forgetting” — and that the event itself, and memory of its victims, eventually could be lost.
“When it happened it was so devastating; everyone was flying the flag,” says Sallyann Gagne of Myrtle Beach, S.C. “Now it’s just something that happened. I never hear people talk about it. At this rate it’ll be a dead issue — until the next attack happens.”
Their relatives insist that the victims — and how they died — should never be forgotten.
“I can understand people are getting tired, but this was such a significant atrocity,” says Betty Kemmerer, whose 79-year-old mother, Hilda Marcin, died aboard United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers revolted against hijackers. “People shouldn’t forget.”
But some 9/11 victims’ relatives are resigned to the eventual decline of the anniversary’s profile.
“Naturally, there’s going to be a diminution of feeling this year compared to last year,” says Donn Marshall of Shepherdstown, W.Va., who lost his wife, Shelley, in the attack on the Pentagon.
“I’m not worried that the focus will shift. I expect it to,” says Louise Hughes of Sayreville, N.J., whose 24-year-old son Bobby was one of the 2,749 killed at the World Trade Center. “You can’t understand something like this unless you’re truly involved in it.”
But Frank Zortman of Mountain Home, Ark., who worked next to the World Trade Center and ran for his life when the first tower collapsed, says the lessening interest in observing the anniversary doesn’t particularly bother him: “People just can’t continually live in the past. It’s a healing process. You have to move on.”
Marshall strikes a different note. He says he does not want 9/11 forgotten because “I do not want evil to have the last word.”
Fear of forgetting
Students of history say that concerns about 9/11 fatigue or amnesia, while understandable, are probably exaggerated. They say the day will have a long run in Americans’ memory.
“It will take decades to process what happened,” says David Isay, a radio documentary maker who has gathered Americans’ stories about 9/11.
“I think 9/11 fatigue is a media construct,” he says. “That day will be honored and remembered for hundreds of years.”
For many Americans who lived through 9/11, forgetting — about the attacks, the terrorists behind them and the victims — is the ultimate fear. They feel the one thing they can do for the lost is to remember them.
In 2004, Louise Hughes told USA TODAY of her prime goal after her son’s death: “We just wanted him to not be forgotten. … Everyone you talk to who’s in the same predicament feels the same way. You can’t make anything good of it, but if you just try to make people remember him in some small way, it’s something.”
Even then, though, she was pessimistic: “We’ll, of course, never forget. But other people will.”
Today, she believes her prediction is coming true.
“My own family’s moving on,” she says. One of her daughters got married last year, and another will wed in October. “That’s good, they’re happy going on with their lives.”
However, Hughes adds, she and her husband “are still muddling through.”
The national family is caught in a similar bind over how, exactly, to handle the 9/11 anniversary. Is it OK to get married on Sept. 11? To throw a bachelor party? How long does a nation wear black?
In recent years, Joan Crooks of Westminster, S.C., would never have flown over an ocean on Sept. 11. But Tuesday she and two friends will fly to Germany.
As for the anniversary, Crooks says, “I’m so excited about the trip I don’t think it will be on my mind.”
Analysts such as Indiana’s Linenthal say there are reasons why the anniversary already has faded a bit in the public’s mind and probably will continue to do so.
One is that the process of officially memorializing 9/11 has been marked by delay and discord. Exhibit A: the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site.
“That situation has been so intense and so incredibly complex at so many levels for so long, it’s become like a marathon,” Linenthal says.
Progress on the memorial, which includes a museum and memorial plaza featuring two symbolic pools, once was projected to cost nearly $1 billion. It languished as fundraising lagged and its original leader resigned. Now the plaza is due to open in late 2009, the museum in 2010.
This year, however, the anniversary in New York has been clouded by two controversies.
First, the city decided to break with tradition and hold the ceremony away from the Trade Center foundation hole. A counter-ceremony by some victims’ families was averted only after the city agreed to let relatives briefly walk down into the pit.
Second, some relatives bitterly criticized the decision to allow Rudy Giuliani, New York’s mayor in 2001 but now a presidential candidate, permission to do a reading at ceremony.
“It’s disgraceful — a photo op,” says James Riches, a deputy New York City fire chief whose firefighter son, Jimmy, died at the site.
Sept. 11 has always been a political football. With everyone from the late evangelist Jerry Falwell to writer Susan Sontag pontificating on the meaning of the event, 9/11 “became political capital for people across the spectrum, splitting the collective memory,” Linenthal says. “Pearl Harbor never had that problem.”
Subsequent tragedies and events — the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the Virginia Tech massacre — have distracted Americans from the memory of 9/11.
“To remember something, you have to forget something else,” Linenthal says. “If your husband or child is in Iraq, maybe remembering 9/11 this year is not at the top of your list.”
The more than 3,000 Americans killed in Iraq since 2003 represent a new group for the nation to mourn. Philip Murray of Wilmington, Del., whose son John died in the Trade Center attacks, says the war in Iraq has “spread out beyond 9/11. … Many military families are experiencing the same thing we are.”
But there are reasons why the anniversary of Sept. 11 will not fade significantly anytime soon:
• The impact. For those alive that day, 9/11 will live on simply because it was so perversely spectacular. Not just one jetliner was hijacked, but four; not just hijacked, but deliberately crashed into buildings; not just any buildings; but the nation’s two biggest skyscrapers and its military headquarters. Then the skyscrapers collapsed — in view of a worldwide television audience.
• The images. For those not alive that day, 9/11 will long endure as a series of uniquely shocking images: a jetliner hitting a skyscraper, office workers leaping to their deaths, pedestrians fleeing a huge black cloud.
• The legacy. Sept. 11’s importance has only grown over the past six years.
“The very structure of our daily life reminds us of 9/11,” Linenthal says. “Every time you take your shoes off in an airport. Every report you hear from Iraq.”
Glo Perrizo’s daughter Danelle, a sergeant in the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division, is on her second tour of duty in Iraq.
Perrizo, who lives in Valley Springs, S.D., says that recognizing the 9/11 anniversary is a way to honor soldiers fighting in the U.S. response to the terror attacks: “I think we should have an observance. What happened on 9/11 changed the United States forever.”
• The date. We refer to D-Day, not 6/6/44; to Pearl Harbor Day, not Dec. 7, 1941; to the Kennedy assassination, not Nov. 22, 1963. But the terrorist attacks of 2001 are known by a date that will long be known by its digits.
Thompson, the Syracuse professor, says Sept. 11 is rivaled only by July Fourth as the best-remembered date in U.S. history: “It’s more effective than declaring it a holiday. You’ll never have to teach school kids that date.”
The popularity of 9/11 as a reference has prevented “Patriot Day,” the date’s designation by the federal government in 2002, from catching on. The media has even dubbed terrorist attacks in other nations as “Spain’s 9/11" or “London’s Sept. 11th.”
Keeping memories alive
Many Americans do what they can to keep the memory of 9/11 alive. Six years later, memorials are still being planned, updated or dedicated.
In Slidell, La., which suffered heavily from Hurricane Katrina, people are raising money for a proposed Memorial Plaza to honor those who died on 9/11.
In Somerset County, Pa., part of state Route 219 last month was named the “Flight 93 Memorial Highway” to honor passengers and crew who died in the United airliner’s crash in a nearby field.
In Bayonne, N.J., which lost 13 people on 9/11, officials will dedicate the city’s memorial to them on Tuesday.
The National Sept. 11 Museum, whose building is taking shape at what used to be Ground Zero, is sending a traveling exhibition around the nation this month. It includes a steel beam to be used in the museum’s construction that exhibit visitors can sign.
In Skaneateles, N.Y., the friends, relatives and admirers of Todd Pitman gathered Saturday for an annual golf tournament and dinner to raise money for the charitable foundation his sister started in his name after he was killed at the Trade Center.
The organization myGoodDeed.org calls on Americans to mark 9/11 by doing charitable acts. This year the group has received more than 50,000 pledges for deeds, some large (Andrew Reinholz of Mesa, Ariz., will buy a special van for a boy with cerebral palsy) and some small (Lisa Scheive of Pompano Beach, Fla., plans to rescue turtles crossing the road).
Those are just the official events. Early September sees countless less formal gatherings in which the legacy of 9/11 is transmitted in stories — told and retold, rehearsed and subtly altered, passed from one generation to the next.
“The fifth anniversary was a milestone for us all,” says Mary Fetchet of New Canaan, Conn., whose 24-year-old son Brad died at the Trade Center.
“It’s critical now that we begin documenting and collecting. If we don’t, it’s going to be lost.”
She’s a founder of the 9/11 Living Memorial, an online archive that will preserve memories of the victims and, she says, “reverse what terrorism is all about — a faceless evil.”
“I need to talk about it,” says Pat Whalen of Canton, Mich., whose 23-year-old daughter Meredith died at the Trade Center. “I’ll never shut that part of me down.”
Linenthal says that when it comes to remembering 9/11, “there’s a desperate urge for people to pay attention. This emphasis on faces, names and stories, and in the reading of their names each year, it’s a protest against the anonymity of mass death in our time.”
Contributing: Stu Whitney of the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, S.D.; Ben Schmitt of the Detroit Free Press; Ron Barnett of The Greenville (S.C.) News; Maureen Milford of TheNews Journal in Wilmington, Del.; Joanne Bratton of The Baxter Bulletin in Mountain Home, Ark.; and Laura Bruno of the Daily Record in Morristown, N.J.