The Event — simply known as “Nine-Eleven“ —remains to this day one of the two most traumatic events in America’s recent history (the other being Pearl Harbor). The World Trade Center was America’s symbol of economic opulence and business power, the shining example of its financial prowess. Its destruction, along with the deaths of close to 3,000 souls, created a memory in the American psyche that is as unforgettable as it is unforgivable.
This was inflicted on a land long taken for granted as the safest haven from all the trials and tribulations that routinely afflict other nations. America, the Fortress-Island of order and safety and invincibility, was shaken to its core by this savagery that was beyond imagination.
This mental and emotional shock was all over the nation, affecting virtually all Americans. They called for blood and vengeance, and any measure taken to avenge the deaths and destruction would have been morally, politically, and even historically justifiable.
Now, 20 years have passed from that day of horror. Is this long enough a time span to call Nine-Eleven “an historical event”? Can we, as Americans, look at the event in historical perspective, as we look at the Crucifixion of Jesus or the Holocaust? It was over 2,000 years ago that the Roman Empire nailed Jesus to the cross, but turned itself into the center of Christianity in the ensuing centuries. Today, no American holds the Romans, or their modern version Italians, with anger or bitterness for the Crucifixion of Jesus. Enough historical time has passed to help us put the event — perhaps the greatest event since the Creation — into historical perspective.
The Jewish Holocaust took place over three generations ago. The Germans, like the Romans, have been exemplary in their acts of atonement, spending every moment, and almost every dollar, to erase the stains of their crimes and sins against the Jews. The world has largely forgiven the Germans, as proven by Germany’s full integration into the community of nations. Although the ember of the Jewish tragedy continues to be stoked into small flames here and there, the Holocaust as “an historical event” continues to recede from our living bitterness and grief.
For Americans, Pearl Harbor has fallen into “an historical event” faster than anyone expected by the combined effect of Japan’s total defeat under America’s atomic power and her resumption of traditional low posture in sorrows and regrets coupled with friendly alliances with the U.S. that followed. Few Americans still hold grudge against Japan for Pearl Harbor and the latter’s memorial in Hawaii is routinely visited by the Japanese tourists without incidents. (My late father-in-law, who had served in World War II, felt almost blasphemous to buy a Japanese automobile. But even he relented in his later years and bought a car from Toyota.)
Are two decades, since the attack on the World Trade Center, enough for America’s living generation, to put it in perspective? The answer is, of course not. Nine-Eleven still stokes anger and grief in most Americans. To prove this, we just disengaged from Afghanistan only days ago after 20 long years of War on Terror, America’s longest war. The war is over, but is our anger and grief over? Of course, it’s still unclear, unlike our good-and-evil clarity toward Pearl Harbor, as we live in an age of moral confusion, how we should assess our feelings against those we call “terrorists.”
As we renew our day of memorializing the event, we are also painfully aware of the looming shadow of human history which marches relentlessly, easily bypassing our fragile individual existences on this earth. The lesson we should learn from this day is simple: The sooner we put this event, any event, in historical perspective — as we do with the Crucifixion of Jesus and continue to do with the Holocaust and Pearl Harbor — the better the living generation, and its posterity, would be served with historical wisdom.
Indeed, it is a helpful (although difficult) exercise, for our soul and intellect, to raise questions about what history would say about Nine-Eleven a hundred or even millennial years later. We cannot force history to go faster, but we can imagine ourselves to be travelers in history so that we are here today as if it’s a hundred or millennial years later. Imagining today how we would be dealing with the same issues generations later is the essence of historical thinking.
In our present reckoning, we should not forget one stern fact that comes from human history: All the nations that fought wars against one another since the Thirty Years War — including the Hundred Years War, Napoleonic Wars, Franco-Prussian War, World Wars I and II, Vietnam War, with the exception of Korea and the War on Terror — have become friends. Historically, even the two Koreas and the Taliban may soon become friends again with their respective foes.
As the ancients have taught us, History continues to whisper to its suffering humanity: This too shall pass.
Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield.