SHANKSVILLE, Pa. (AP) — The Shanksville Hills seem to swallow the sound. of the landscape, creating a pocket of calm exactly where calm wants to be.
It is a position that encourages the act of remembering.
Twenty years have passed since United Flight 93 made its last descent, with chaos unfolding on board as ships burned three hundred miles to the east. Nearly a fifth of the country is too young for the day it replaced it all. viewpoint, near the place where the plane crashed, the memory is the most important thing.
Remembering is not just a state of mind. As those who plead with us that never the Holocaust has long insisted, it is an act. And when loss and trauma hit human beings, the act of remembering takes many forms.
Memory is political. Those who disagree about the fate of Confederate statues in the southern United States prove it, as do those who discuss how much the war on terror and its consequences are part of discussions about memories of September 11.
The remembrance occurs in the ceremonies of Ground Zero and in the moments of silence and prayer after prayer, both public and private, and is manifested in popular monuments such as those that are erected in the aspect of remote roads to mark the places of death due to traffic accidents. embedded in the names of positions, such as the road leading to the Flight 93 Memorial, the Lincoln Highway. It appears in the recovery of “flash memories”, the moments when you were, when this happened, that we have left, exactly, no.
There are non-public memories and cultural memories and political memories, and the barriers are blurred.
And for generations, reminiscence has been presented to us in monuments and memorials like Shanksville, subtle to evoke memories and feelings in some way.
However, as the monuments rise, the reminiscence of himself evolves. How september 11 is based when we get to September 11. So what does it mean in the case of the 20th anniversary of an occasion like September 11, even though its echoes are?Do you still shake the foundations of everything?
“Our supply influences how we don’t forget the afterlife, in a way that we know and in a way that we don’t realize,” says Jennifer Talarico, a professor of psychology at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, who studies how other people shape non-public memories. of public events . .
Proof of this is evident during the more than five weeks in Afghanistan, where a 20-year war as a direct reaction to September 11 ended practically where it began: with the repressive and violent Taliban again.
But even within a more static bureaucracy of reminiscence, such as Flight 93 National Monument, there is still a glimpse of how the reminiscence evolves.
In the guest center, the visceral and painful artifacts of the moment still bring back the afterlife with astonishing efficiency; the twisted, scarred cutlery from food in flight is impressive, but the variety of memories presented within a few meters of the tranquil view and its considerate monument feels more permanent, more eternal.
“You can believe a memorial technique that freezes anger in time or fear. And it can be a very expressionist art painting. But I feel like anything has to last a long time, I think it has to paint in a different way,” says Murdoch, who co-designed the monument with his wife, Milena.
“Now we have a generation of other people who weren’t even alive on September 11,” Murdoch says. “So how do you communicate with other people in this new generation, or long-term generations?”
This consultation is especially strong on this anniversary. Society has a tendency to mark generations in packages of two decades, so there is an entire born and raised since the attacks. However, this does not mean that they have not paid attention: they also “remember”.
Even those who didn’t have bright memories of Sept. 11, Batcho says, responded with stories about the event, remembering it as a shared experience.
Many of the first encounters with September 11 were, in the culture of the data age, separate and common. People in other parts of the country and the world, in very different circumstances, observed the same camera angles in the same few broadcasts and saw the same now indelible prospects of destruction in the same way. They did it separately, but together.
It shaped a non-unusual type of memory, rarely other people who saw the same things did not forget it in the same way: a camera angle or an express point of view, the comments of a key character, the precise series of Remember can be like this, experts say.
“You’d think the memories would be more coherent and homogeneous,” Batcho says. “It turns out it’s much more confusing than that. “
The basic tension of this kind of remembrance – it seems that, however, it is also a component of the story – confronts us in the days to come. Memory becomes history. And history, shared history, is held firmly, rarely with rage. That’s why many other people cling tightly to comforting and nostalgic old narratives, even when they’ve proven destructive.
When the story of reminiscence, it can be more distant, as a monument to revolutionary war for other people whose passions and sacrifices have been sanded over time. With distance, it can be calcified.
That possibly wouldn’t happen until September 11, of course. His politics are turbulent. The arguments it produced, and the tactics in which it led society in another direction, are as intense as in the early days.
And when a country stops the morning it was attacked 20 years ago, it doesn’t just look over its shoulder, it also looks around and wonders: what does this mean for us now?
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Ted Anthony, director of new narrative and innovation for The Associated Press newsroom, served as AP’s news director for Asia and the Pacific from 2014 to 2018 and after Sept. 11 in Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2001 to 2003. /twitter. com/anthonyted