We have discovered the limits of our collective national memory – it’s about 8 years. There was almost nothing in the news until this morning, and even today’s headlines in the nation’s leading papers reflect the sense that we have moved on, that if anything, we are remembering an event that not only occurred in the past, but is no longer a real part of our present.
Of course this should not really surprise anyone, especially in light of our past. 8 years after the end of WWl, we were living as if we really had won the war to end all wars and that every tomorrow would be better than today. By 1953, our most strategic ally in WWll, the Soviet Union, had become our most bitter foe. In 1981, Ronald Regan took office and Viet Nam was a distant memory for all but those who fought there and their families.
I guess it’s a good thing that we are making so little of the eight anniversary of the 9/11 attacks – good insofar as it reflects a diminishing level of fear, anxiety and suspicion in our country. A certain amount of forgetting is appropriate — it’s part of the healing process. But we need to figure how to let go a little w/o forgetting almost entirely.
I cannot help but wonder if we have not strayed too far down that latter path, the one of forgetting the past so much that we learn no lessons from it.

When any nation’s memories are overly animated by a sense of their own victimization, they invariably become victimizers. The examples are legion and most obviously, include the collective thinking of those who flew the planes into the Pentagon, the Twin Towers, and a field in Pennsylvania. When any nation forgets past attacks though, it sets itself up to be attacked again.
For starters, we need to learn how to remember in a way that is honest and frank about the real challenges we still face without dredging up all the fear, anxiety and suspicion that makes us do things we ultimately regret.
We need to figure out how to keep memory alive in ways that helps us to build a better and more secure future without dredging up hurt and rage to mobilize us. That’s never easy to do, but if we cannot do so, we are positioning ourselves for one of two futures: either we continue to be victims or we become just another version of those who victimized us.
Neither of those is acceptable and we all have a role in making sure that neither of them happens. Thinking about that role is one way each of us can keep the past with us while keeping our eyes focused on the future.