So, I work at a high school, and every year, around September 11th, I get some kind of memo from my boss–the school’s principal–reminding the teachers to “talk to the kids about 9/11.” Each year I get roughly the same version of a 9/11 narrative from the kids. The following phrases are pulled from actual past narratives, and are chosen because they represent the basic thrust of most of the writings. Occasionally a narrative will be of some interest–maybe a kid from New York or D.C., or a particularly thoughtful or sensitive kid–but on the whole, the following is pretty standard:
“They turned on the TV. My teacher was crying. I didn’t know what was going on. I was in middle school [ed. note–in the past couple of years, depending on the grade I teach of course, the kids tend to be in elementary school–this years batch were about ten years old in 2001]. I was scared, but then I was happy because I got to go home. It didn’t really effect me. I didn’t really care. We should get school off every 9/11.”
The memo this year likened 9/11 to life-changing “I remember where I was when _____” events like the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Apollo moon landing, the JFK assassination, and (no kidding) the 2004 World Championship of the Boston Red Sox.
On one hand, I have no problem with this: I will never forget where I was on the morning of 9/11 (asleep and hungover in my brother’s old bed in my parents’ house) or what I was doing (nothing; I was unemployed; I was supposed to move to Tokyo the following week) or how I felt (shocked and scared and weirded out and secretly selfishly ashamedly worried that my international plans were now in jeopardy). I add my own experiences parenthetically, because the are of no importance; still, the spectacular disaster of 9/11–no matter what your take on the whole thing is (how it happened and who did it and why it was done, etc.)–the spectacular disaster of 9/11 exists as an ideological construct demarcating a social shift: hence the term post-9/11 and all things post-9/11, etc. etc. etc.
And so well this is my problem: what are we doing when we mark the day to these children; specifically, what am I–a teacher–doing when I affirm the ideological significance of 9/11 to my students, despite the fact that they clearly–repeatedly–have no interest beyond self-interest in the whole thing (“We should get the day off school”)? This is not a rhetorical question; this is an earnest and most sincere question, one that I don’t have an answer for. My students display the same distanced ambivalence toward 9/11 that I might hold for, say, the U.S. exit from Saigon or the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It’s something that I’ve been told I should care about for a range of historical reasons beyond my personal control or personal range of power; somehow, it should inform my identity (“American”) and my ideology (“good American”). I accept these ideological markers as “historical facts” and neglect the margins of history in favor of a much easier story to follow.
I’m not railing against the “importance” of 9/11 or whether or not 9/11 is important: I go back to my question in the previous paragraph: what am I doing when I affirm the ideological significance of 9/11 to my students? Exactly what ideology is being affirmed? Why is 9/11 like the Apollo moon landing or the JFK assassination? By transitive property of its I-remember-where-I-wasness? Clearly this has to be a public where-I-wasness, a shared where-I-wasness; nobody is going around comparing 9/11 to the day they lost their virginity or the day their child was born (although undoubtedly people got laid for the first time and children were born on 9/11/01). But this need to make sure our children recognize 9/11 as an ideological marker cannot simply be rooted in a shared where-I-wasness, can it?
My gut feeling is that the post-9/11 ideology may seem vague and amorphous, and may seem to be as-yet-undefined and up for grabs and still under debate, but in reality, there are forces at work shaping this ideology: the grand spectacle of 9/11 insured a public where-I-wasness that has honestly marked me. Now that mark, that trace, is something that I am expected to re-mark on, to pass on, to send down into my students. Only I’m not sure exactly what the mark means, and their vacant eyes affirm what I think I fear: my personal experience of where-I-wasness is just a symptom of acute exposure to spectacle, and nothing these kids really care about. And should they care?
Biblioklept 
They should care. 9/11 is a defining event for Americans that experienced it first-hand. It goes with the Challenger space shuttle failure as things I will never forget because they were tragic and I watched them happen (though I was asleep and also unemployed for the actual plane crashes).
The events were so large, like I knew they would be important the second they happened. They are so large that I can’t really wrap my mind around their significance other than knowing they’re pretty. damn. significant.
I don’t think this nerddom will sully your post so I’ll quote Commissioner James Gordon in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns:
“A lot of people with a lot of evidence said that Roosevelt knew Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked . . . and that he let it happen. . . . A lot of innocent men died. But we won the war. . . . It bounced back and forth in my head until I realized I couldn’t judge it. It was too big. He was too big.”
Another event that is inexorably linked with 9/11 for me is 11M — the bombing of the Madrid train station. The wife and I had been in Spain just six months before and stood on those same train platforms. Having been there, much like I had been in the shadow of the WTC in 1999, eating lunch at a horrible sushi restaurant that gave me food poisoning, makes the events so real and yet surreal at the same time.
LikeLike
If they really have no interest beyond self-interest perhaps it would be most beneficial to steer the dialog away from the where-were-you-when-it-happened-and-wasn’t-it-freaky aspect of 9-11 and help students to realize the myopia of believing “I didn’t die and no one I know died in the attack so it didn’t affect me.” Understanding how current events that don’t seem to directly affect you, invariably really do affect you in great measure is something that many adults, let alone adolescents, never manage to do (see U.S. voter turnout). This is largely because of the delayed and indirect manner in which world events or politics ultimately end up affecting the average person. I’m sure many of your students figure, “I’m not in the military and none of my loved ones are either, so Iraq doesn’t affect me,” or “I’m not buying or selling a house, why should I care about what’s going on in the housing market?” I was the same way when I graduated high school in 1999. I did not vote in the 2000 presidential election because I figured it didn’t really matter who was president because all politicians were basically the same and were all corrupt. I didn’t really keep up with current events because I felt they were “too depressing.” But mostly, I think I felt that keeping up with those types of things was unimportant because it didn’t really affect me. If, back then, I and a few thousand other recent Floridian HS graduates like me had realized that regardless of how much we loathed or were indifferent to it, matters of money and power affect everyone, the world now be a very different place.
LikeLike
The students in my school are totally in the mindset of “It could never happen to me.” Take today, for example. We read an excerpt from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1970 Nobel lecture, in which he proposes that world literature allows people to see the truth about themselves, and that truth reveals the lies that protect those who commit violence. Although the students could identify some of the “mistakes of history” (Mr. S’s term)–slavery, segregation, the Holocaust, etc.–none of them said it could happen to them in America today. And of course, this is the risk: ignorant bliss leads to genocide, etc. etc. etc. My approach in the classroom is rarely to “give” an “answer,” but today my frustration boiled over, when they suggested that there was “no way” that there would ever be a draft again. For a few years now, I’ve believed that reinstating the military draft will be key to ending this bloody stupid war in Iraq; more importantly, personal risk and the threat of meaningless sacrifice will necessitate that young people actually care about what’s going on. Today cinched that for me. These kids (despite living in poverty) are spoiled brats: I truly believe that the only way to mobilize a real anti-war movement is for the youth to have to face the prospect of going to war.
LikeLike
it is true, indeed, that reinstatement of the draft will be the only way to end american warmongering.
government policy, at the time of the last draft, was such that if a family had multiple combat-eligible young men in it, one of them had to stay home. from what i gather, this was often a decision that the family would make together. i think that if real-life “holy shit, which son do we NOT send to die” kind of decisions had to be made by people today, the bullshit “in mass mind,” suburban warmongering idiology that’s taken root in our society would fade. quickly.
LikeLike
I guess I tend to forget that the post-9/11 experience is much different outside of New York. Here, it is still very real, and very scary to people young and old. At least once a week on the subway when going through a tunnel, say, and the train stops for a minute or so due to delays at the other end, I get flashes of what it would be like some terrorist blew up the tunnels and water came rushing in and we all drowned in there.
At the time of the attacks, I thought to myself that all of America was experiencing the event together, that we were all unified in shared the terror that people in NYC and DC felt. It wasn’t until I moved here that I realized that 9/11 was something much much different for people in those places. They won’t forget it, in much more than a where-I-was-at that-moment way (I was awakened by my roommates at my house in Gainesville, FL who I seriously thought were saying, in my half-dream state “the earth’s core is rising to the surface.” For about 15 seconds I thought we all only had hours to live. I got up in time to see the second plane hit. It was terrifying.).
We were too removed down in Florida and elsewhere, and still are. And I don’t think that a trip to ground zero helps either…it’s just a big hole in the ground with a bunch of European tourists milling around it. Things have to hit close to home in order for the average person to “get it.” Especially the average American teenager. I also think that a draft would be the only way to end this maddess. But hopefully it wouldn’t be because they would actually be able to send enough troops over there to get the job done (10 totally ambivalent kids from Florida is no match for one passionate, impoverished young terrorist whose whole family has been killed), but because people that right now don’t see it affecting them would stand up and say enough is enough.
I read a pretty good article in this week’s New York magazine about a girl, now starting her first year at college, whose father was killed in the attacks. It mainly talks about how she has been dealing with the loss of her dad (not very well). Maybe your students would benefit from reading about the experience of a normal person close to their age: http://nymag.com/news/features/37247/?imw=Y
On the flip side, it is also interesting to read about the experiences of kids in Iraq who were in elementary school in 2001. They have grown up seeing their family and friends killed, lost all the comfort and security that many of them had when they were children, and they are PISSED. Yes, we are breeding a new, larger generation of America-hating young men and women. Yes, they will strike us again if they get the chance. Yes, children in Florida should remember 9/11 and everything that has happened since, and what could happen as a result.
But humans are selfish, and will only really care once their brother is injured or killed. Re-instate the draft.
On a side note, I am in the middle of reading Snow by Orhan Pamuk. There is some interesting insight into the minds of undereducated young (in this case) Muslims and their unwavering views on the West and God. Probably very similar to the minds of undereducated young Christians and their views on the Middle East and God. Recommended reading.
LikeLike
I’ve read good things about Snow (sidenote somewhat unrelated: WordPress is banned in Turkey).
I have to go back to a point that I didn’t make clear enough in my original, typo-ridden post: my concern is a concern of ideology. Kids not directly impacted by the 9/11 terrorist attacks will never have the same emotional investment as kids who were; still, they have to contend with/negotiate a “post-9/11” ideology. I think that the 9/11 attacks had ideological significance, but I also think that that significance has been shaped and structured by certain people (the neo-cons; the conservative Christian movement) toward certain ends (long term engagement in a foreign war; the apocalypse). I want my students to care about 9/11 the same way I want them to care about the Holocaust or Apartheid or segregation or __________: I want them to read and learn and relate and question question question: I want their apathy to be filled. I guess; well, I guess it’s hard to translate in writing the scale of apathy that I find daily in most of my students, and the apathy to 9/11 is just another apathy, but it seems so glaring given the relative immediacy of the event. The intention of my post was to point out that our young children are part of a 9/11 ideology that has framed them, structured their way of thinking, imposed upon them by educators, culture, whatever, and that they are given very little room to negotiate the enormity of 9/11. Like all spectacle, it removes the agency of the spectator. Take Pearl Harbor: I really don’t care about December 14th or 15th or whatever infamous day that was. I’m not even sure if it was even in December. I know the historical significance of the day, but I have no emotions about it. However, my grandmother–a WAC–felt an intense hatred toward the Japanese her whole adult life, one which she repeatedly reminded me of as I planned to move to Japan. Pearl Harbor was an ideologically-structuring event that shaped her opinions and attitudes for the rest of her life. There is no doubt in my mind that 9/11 impacted me; however, the impact for kids half my age is not the same impact: I don’t know what it is, but it’s not the same. I think that’s what I’m struggling with here.
LikeLike