What is life but reckoning

It's a weird thought that ten years have passed since something occurred which I can remember with clarity and cognizance. I'm still young, which means that something that happened five years ago still qualifies as "kind of a long time" in my personal history. Ten years seems like a very long time to me, and so the fact that I can knowingly mark the 10th anniversary of something is significant in its own right, apart from any significance of the event itself.

In terms of September 11th, my youngness is revealing in another (though related) way. Yes, I can remember 9/11. I can tell you where I was, what I was doing, what I thought, and what pieces of footage I saw on TV as various events unfolded in real time. I was 13, and as such wasn't a complete nincompoop. I remember 9/11.

At 13, however, and no matter how precocious I was or thought myself to be, I didn't understand September 11th. Illustratively, here's an excerpt from my diary on that day (it should be noted that I didn't actually keep a diary. I only wrote entries on days where I thought something inordinately significant happened, and so literally the only entries in that diary are from 9/11 and the day of my first kiss):

"[...] During gym class was when I found out. My friend Suzie came up to me and asked if I had heard about the Pentagon while we were in the locker room. Then, during gym itself, Mrs. Furlan told us about everything. Unlike usual, everyone was very quiet. [...] It's hard to believe that just this morning the biggest news that filled the televisions was that Michael Jordan was playing basketball again for the Wizards. [...] The news says that this was a terrorist act, possibly by Afghanistan. There are no planes in the sky; it's a little strange. I noticed that people are taking this differently: some laughing, some mourning, some just act like it's not happening and talk about something else. Some look it full in the face and discuss it. [...] We just heard the President speak about retaliation. This is all very frightening. People talking about war. I thought that maybe in my life I wouldn't have to live through a war. Now I'm not so sure."

My diary entry communicates with pretty much total accuracy what I was feeling that day. Which is to say: not much. I understood that what happened was a tragedy in the same, emotionally distant way that I understood the Holocaust to be a tragedy. I understood that it was horrific, historically important, grave, consequential, and that it would undoubtedly have ramifications into the future. I remember writing in my diary and simply trying to record my experiences because I thought I would find them interesting or significant at a later time. I mentally attempted to accept how big of a historical event had just occurred. But I didn't feel much.

I remember thinking that a building collapsing to the ground was a huge and terrible disaster, but for whatever reason (and I'm thinking the reason was "being a child") I didn't think of the people -- the firefighters being asked to climb up 96 flights of stairs, the debilitating panic of the office workers nearby, how horrific it must have been to have 65 floors worth of skyscraper crashing down on you as your last moments on earth. That kind of terrific empathy was, frankly, well beyond my capacities as a 13 year old and is still something I doubt I completely grasp.

And so it's been over the last ten years that I've slowly, gradually started to absorb the actual tragedy that was September 11th. It's not an easy task. The words September 11th, tragedy, patriotism, hero, and particularly terror have become so exhausted in the lexicon to pretty much lose all meaning. Complicating matters is that fact that, in the venture of gaining information, you have to be an intelligent consumer, discerning between emotional tributes and tawdry displays, between meaningful investigation and careless bandwagoning.

Particularly in the last couple weeks, the media has been completely saturated with "tributes," "memorials," and "dedications" to 9/11, as well as several spoonfuls of analyses over whether or not there are too many tributes in the media. Now that it's been a full decade since 9/11, it's even harder to figure out what's in good taste and faith.

I agree, overall, that there's an almost garish amount of 9/11 retrospective leading up to the 10th anniversary. But as someone who is still attempting to emotionally comprehend an incident that I was too young to take in at the time, I've been cautiously touched by and thankful for the impassioned journalism. It's a dubious decision to unearth footage of terror and fear. But today I'm a 23 year old with a brain and a desire for cultural meaning, and I feel like it's right for me to re-experience the event and empathize with my country like I couldn't a decade ago.