Today, all of us bloggers who are remembering the third anniversary of the WTC/Pentagon attacks are remembering it as, of course, a very vivid memory. “Seems like just yesterday,” we say to ourselves, or somesuch.
I suddenly find myself equipped with a sufficiently long memory to have accumulated a small handful of similar cultural… yardsticks? signposts? milestones?
In memory:
- President Kennedy’s assassination
- Nixon boarding the helicopter at the White House for the last time
- the Challenger explosion
None of these really compare to 911. Neither do they compare with each other, except for possibly the first two in that they deal with the untimely removal of Presidents from office. Then again, it isn’t the point, that they compare with each other. 911 is most like Pearl Harbor, I’m assuming, with the attacks on American soil, but I wasn’t alive back then, so can only guess.
It is the point that we mark time by them, big time, cultural time, generational time, not the trivial, by comparison, passage of the uniform lengths of days and months and years. With them we play the recognition game of “Where were you when…?”
It was first played, of course, by those of us in the Baby Boom generation. (Hey, everything and anything important or at least memorable was first done by us! — we tell ourselves. And if it wasn’t, it either doesn’t matter, or we’re going to fix it and make it better in our generation.) Apropos of nothing, we’d find ourselves saying, “Where were you when JFK was shot?” And we’d all have our stories ready. (Sitting in second grade, right in front of Amy Berger who burst into tears because she thought the killer would immediately travel from Dallas to Cincinnati to kill us too.)
Why did we care? The man was buried, the assassin too, and the Warren Commission had issued its report. Because it was a touchstone, tokens to exchange with each other to create a community, an immediate set of references. It was a way for us to place each other in cultural time and space.
By the mid-Eighties, when the Challenger happened, we’d come across the first crop of very young adults who not only couldn’t answer the “Where were you when JFK was shot?” question — because they hadn’t been born yet, or were too young to remember — they were sick to death of hearing the question.
It wasn’t an important question, they said. Not that a president’s assassination itself was unimportant; it was the cultural aspects of the question. Time was passing, they said, had been passing for some time, and there were now people coming of age who had nothing to do with us Baby Boomers culturally. We were too old for them, they said.
A collective gasp! of astonishment from us. Why? Someone whose name I’ve forgotten wrote that it had never occurred to our generation before that people would eventually be younger than us. We were to be the eternal beginning, the Eternal Youth. The Age of Aquarius was always to be dawning, never heading to noon or evening.
Around that time was when rock radio stations started differentiating themselves into oldies and pop and hard rock and R&B etc, people disappeared into their own private listening experiences courtesy of their newly-invented Walkmans, and video rentals and cable TV became a common thing.
No, this sudden cultural splintering wasn’t because we could no longer ask the JFK question with certainty of getting an answer. There were lots of reasons, which many dull books have already been written about. But it’s as good a reason as any to point to — the loss of a universal cultural reference point.
So now we all have 911 to refer to, from all of our various ideologies. It’s way more serious in its implications, with the invention of Homeland Security, and all sorts of airport security people getting up close and personal with you.
But some day, we’ll all be telling our 911 stories to our grandchildren on our collective knee, to whom the day will be no more “real” than the day of Pearl Harbor is to me. Time has to march on like that. It’s the way the universe is built. 911 will be as important then as Pearl Harbor is now, and always will be — just not a living memory for most. I wonder what we’ll tell the kids?
white pebble 