Remembering 9/11 during the Pandemic

By Tara Ebrahimi, Director of Communications

Those of us who were old enough to remember September 11, 2001 will never forget exactly where we were the morning the towers came down, the Pentagon went up in flames, and multiple planes manned by terrorists crashed across the mid-Atlantic. It was my senior year of high school, and as I was going to my locker in between first and second period, I heard rumblings about a plane flying into a building in New York. During history class, my teacher turned on the television and we watched as the explosion overtook one of the World Trade Center towers. We watched as a second plane flew into the second tower. We watched bodies falling through the sky, massive structures crumbling into dust, chaos and calamity and death--unfurling before our very eyes. 

I lived in Northern Virginia at the time, and had classmates whose parents worked at the Pentagon or in New York. Many students left school with no word; administrators too in shock to care about truancy. They canceled school the next day. And for years, nothing was the same. Nearly 3,000 people dead, hundreds of thousands of families forever marred, a seemingly untouchable nation rocked by an attack we never thought could happen to us. We were instructed to never forget, but we didn’t need instruction carrying out the most basic of human acts: mourning, empathy, memory.

Nearly 20 years later, the nation is once again under siege, through multiple crises of its own making: a pandemic that has killed almost 200,000 Americans; a reckoning with structural and systemic racism that has persisted since before the country’s birth; a broken economy that has left between 20-30 million unemployed and approximately 40 million people at risk of homelessness. 

Where is our mourning? 

The grief that swept the nation on and after 9/11 was palpable from coast to coast. We held vigils and memorials. Media told the stories of those who had died and those who would never be the same. We immediately took legislative action to ensure something like this would never happen again. We went so far as to start a war in the name of justice, blaming a false enemy so we could put our grief and rage to use.  

This year, the White House did not order the American flag to fly at half mast until May 22, when the nation’s death count had already reached 100,000 (and only did so at the urging of the House Speaker and Senate Minority Leader). The names of those who have died have not been uttered by so-called leaders appointed to guide us through the most challenging times. Not even the numbers have been spoken of. No federal mandates have been made. No justice has been given for those murdered by the administration’s lack of action, a rampant and rabid police force, a capitalist society that pummels you until you have nothing left to give. No war has been waged on behalf of the dead, because that war would be a war against ourselves. 

Where is our empathy?

In 2001, we shouldered the grief of those most affected. We cried alongside them. We gave of our time and our money, with contributions to survivors and victims’ families totaling more than $657 million in the three weeks following September 11th. We hung our heads low, in deference to death, in collective sorrow for our friends, our coworkers, our neighbors who had lost loved ones. We imagined ourselves in New York, necks craning up to watch everything coming down. We imagined flinging ourselves out of a 90th floor window. We imagined ourselves on Flight 93, the last moments before metal hit metal.

Today, we refuse to wear the masks that could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. We go about our days working and eating out and wishing we could take the vacations we had planned. The wealthiest among us donate .08% of our ever-increasing riches. We forsake the elderly, the disabled, the Black and brown, the poor--because their loss is worth maintaining a status quo that has kept us comfortable and docile and blind. It couldn’t happen to me, to my family, to my friends, therefore, it doesn’t matter, or even worse, it doesn’t exist.

Where is our memory?

Throughout the past few months, you’ve surely heard the phrase “time has lost all meaning,” or something to that effect. It feels like somehow it’s been both years since the pandemic began and also only days. Our collective memory feels disjointed and fading, because there is no collective memory of this moment in time. The chasm between us has grown, with half of us trying hard to remember, to hold the loss in our hearts, and half of us gleefully allowing the memories of avoidable deaths, the suffering of the underserved, and the inaction of a cruel and malicious regime to wash away like footprints on the sand. But the footprints aren’t on sand, they are on stone. 

So when you hear or see the words “Never Forget” today, which you will countless times, remember that for many Americans, never forgetting only counts for some.