How could I?
When every website I visit reminds me with the photos.
Do you think I'm a goldfish?
I'm already remembering the Alamo, the Maine, the Lusitania, the Pueblo. I'm not forgetting Pearl Harbor nor the holocaust. Likewise Japan is not ever forgetting Nagasaki and Hiroshima but with no genuine moral lesson stated there for themselves.
Must I stay resentful about September eleventh too? Must I keep my emotion on fire?
I think what is meant is don't let the opposition party re-write history to whitewash what happened, who did it, why they say they did it, and our reactions. Don't allow opposition to diminish what happened with fresh writings such as, "airplanes took aim at the towers," and "some people did some things."
Acknowledging the truly heroic things that people did that we learned about afterward that are inspiring and very much worth knowing, still in a way I envy the young Americans born after that year.
The Korean War ended one year before I was born and it was already ancient history to me. WWII and WWI and The Civil War were so long ago they was hardly worth mentioning. Yet my father took us to places such as Gettysburg and Valley Forge. I studied so many war memorial statues that I'd stand there at the base thinking, "Man, this art is really ugly. Glad it's not me living this." Over and over and over.
Then standing at the base of the samurai statue, Kusunoki Masashige, in front of the Imperial Palace, I'm thinking, "Damn, you guys got this same thing too."
I never could understand heartbreak.
I couldn't see how that wrecked someone's life. Why couldn't the victim carry on as they did before the tragedy happened? Tuck it away as a thing in the past and move forward. Why couldn't they get over it? Why did the thing have to ruin their life?
Until tragedy happened to me and my life really was upended completely and the tragedy really did ruin my life as it was, and I realized then that I'm not quite so sociopathic as I thought after all and as I'm building my new life I will learn whatever there is in there to learn and take that with me as I go, that is, I'll remember.
2 comments:
18 years is a long time. In 1959, did it serve a purpose to remember Pearl Harbor? Relations with Japan were normalized by that time. Of course, we were a bit more serious about responding to them between 1941 and 1945. I agree with not forgetting what actually happened and not whitewashing the history to "some planes crashed into the towers and one into the Pentagon and a fourth in a field" (to paraphrase the NYT and a member of Congress). Otherwise, I'm ready for our response to 9/11 to be over, because it has never seemed very serious.
Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
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