Never Forget

9/11 was 14 years ago.

To some, it feels as if it was ages ago. Others, it feels like it was yesterday. It's definitely a landmark event in 21st century American history, probably one of the earliest landmarks to occur. An event that puts a lot of things about our lives into perspective. If you are like the majority of Americans who were witnesses to the most destructive act of domestic terrorism since another infamous date, you probably were not personally affected by it. I should qualify that word, personally,  not in the sense that it did not evoke an emotional response out of you, but rather having been affected by the loss of a family member, someone close to you. There's definitely a large amount of people who were affected in this way, and that should be acknowledged and respected, but the fact of the matter is most if not all American's experiences with 9/11 were what I mentioned before, an emotional reaction. Anger, frustration, confusion, fear, sorrow, insecurity...and everything in between. 14 years later, the emotions have died down considerably since the day of, and instead I feel have mostly been replaced with the idea of unification, thankfulness, awareness of how precious our loved ones are. Even after so long, as they say, we still have not forgotten.

But will we?

It's almost a sacrilege thing to question, will we ever forget one of the most tragic events in our country's history? I should clarify first that it's not that we, as generations go by, want to forget about it. In fact, the images we can recall from that distant day show quite the opposite, we actually can't forget about it. What about those who can't recall? Last blog post, I talked a little bit about the classifications of generations as years progress. If you're born between 1980 and 1999, you're a part of Generation Y. In our current time frame, we are in Generation Z, those born at the turn of the millennium. But as this generation of early Zs (perhaps that's a bad classification...) starts to grow up, they have not developed with the same memories and feelings that we have experienced. This is a link to one of my favorite XKCD articles, detailing what year a majority of Americans will be too young to remember a particular event; landmark; or person in history, based on census population projections. If you're a younger reader, maybe younger than myself, the first several entries may hold zero significance to you. If you happen to be an older reader, you just got really sad. Sorry about that. If this doesn't put enough perspective on the issue, allow me to say that next year, the majority of high school freshman will have been born in a post-9/11 world.

They won't know anything about 9/11 apart from documentation.

I wouldn't say that it is our own forgetfulness having recollections of 9/11 that will cause us to forget. Really there's nothing we can do about the actual problem: generational replacement. I'm sure as a younger reader seeing the XKCD article, some of the future dates definitely grounded you back to Earth about the relative shortness of this concept of generational replacement. People knowing a world without Facebook will have been outnumbered by 2038. That's in 23 years. Seems like an unfathomably long time, but the scary reality is that it is much, much closer than we may think it is. Generational replacement is really interesting to contemplate, because it showcases an evolution in human mentality. Will not living with the memory of 9/11 perhaps cause future generations to be less spiteful? No one can say for sure. It's a waiting game at this point. But what I find even more interesting is the fate of the memories that we do forget. Memories that, at one point, had incredible emotional value to you, but for the life of you it just can't come back to you. These memories more often than not are much more personable than a historical event, pertaining specifically to our lives and how the course of those lives are changed in conjunction.

Yet we still forget.

I had a sudden rush of emotion yesterday from memories past. A one statement bomb that exploded my head into a mushroom cloud of different emotions and experiences. Nostalgia is the best way that I could put it. A longing for a better time. What could have been. Was it good? That's strangely a yes and no answer. It brought back memories that I knew I could never forget, but after thinking over all of these memories, I realized how much there was that I just simply didn't remember. Moments I said I would never forget. Things so close to me. Just...gone. Will they reappear? Maybe. But it's disheartening at the least to think about all of the times in our lives that were so incredible, so meaningful, and yet were erased by time. I feel guilty but there isn't a lot for me to be guilty of.

So what does any of this mean?

As we've learned in the case of both historical and life events, time gradually begins to wear away what we once thought was permanent. Unchanging. I think it's a surprise to us when those events actually do change in our perception, because we've told ourselves for so long that these memories are important; but when the wind of change blows in our direction and the sands of time are washed away by the waves of our conscious thought, the aftermath reveals that possibly these events weren't as important or impressionable as we once thought. And that's sad, involuntarily dumping memories to make room for new ones. But the silver lining is that the memories that do last a lifetime, the all encompassing experiences that perhaps you never thought would ever turn out to be so significant...they never go away; however, it's near impossible to distinguish what will be important to us in the future. So how do we handle that? Well, cherish what you've got. I feel like humanity is always so forward thinking, and with a relatively short life span it isn't hard to see the reasoning behind that. We're always moving on to what's next while we take for granted what we have now. Treat everything, every day, as a gift. It won't be there forever. The memories might not, either. I still wish I held it closer with me. But it's not a person's past that defines them. It's how they recover from their past. 14 years later, I'd say all of us have recovered in some way. Together.

Don't forget that.