9/11 and What it means to remember

Every academic year, there is an obligatory portion of the day at school designated towards referring back to the events of September 11th, 2001. This being the 13th year since then, I emphasize the word obligatory, because for many it feels exactly as such. Naturally, we're referring to a tragedy that for many of us is still very recent and deserves it's acknowledgement and respectful consideration. However, especially in our classroom as the years go by, high school students in your position will find themselves continually separated from the issue -making it hard to feel personally affected. In adapting the issue and making it more relevant, I would like for us to address the topic of remembrance as a broader scale.

This Sunday, the first season of the HBO series, The Leftovers, had it's final episode for the year. In case you're not familiar with the show, here are a couple teaser trailers. The premise basically being about people trying to move on with their lives, 3 years after a sudden and unexplained vanishing of 2% of the world's population (~140 million people).



The show allegorically tells a story of grief and loss and how communities respond to tragedy. In many ways, mirroring how our community may have reacted in the wake of 9/11. Amidst the characters, there is a cult-like group of people wearing all white -The Guilty Remnant. In the series, their main objective is to act as living reminders of the tragic events of that October 14th, three years prior. They do not speak, they are always smoking cigarettes, and their presence is seen as a blight on the community because people would like to just move on from the tragedy -something the Guilty Remnant resists by constantly finding ways to bring the tragedy to everyone's immediate attention.



The second teaser trailer embedded here is interesting in that it borrows its lines from a famous work of poetry:

"I wish I could translate the hints about the [departed] young men
     and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring
     taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and
     children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

[. . .]

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to [depart] is different from what any one supposed, and
     luckier."

  -From "Song of Myself, IV" by Walt Whitman

The specific passage from Whitman's works does a good job of highlighting many of the themes associated with this allegory of loss and grief. It asks you to see the tragedy itself as a dividing force between the past, present, and future. For those of us that remain, we can't help but see the day before tragedy as such a distant pass, despite it having even been a few hours away. While we mourn the tragedy and those that are no longer here with us, there is also a sense of nostalgia that begets a sort of envy for those same individuals -they will never have to know the chaos that consumes our lives post-tragedy. Even now, as we reach over a decade later, we look at the 1990s as this great time in our history. "Even the cartoons were better", some people go as far as arguing over.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/dec/22/fiction.dondelillo

In the above link, we will be reading an article by Don Delillo, published three months after that September 11th. The article itself is a heavy read, coming in at 12 pages, but you will have ample time to read the text closely and mark whatever you find interesting enough. Namely, focusing on the parts that you think best reflect what Whitman touches on in his poem, which in turn also matches the tone of the series trailers you watched above. It is also worth nothing that you will find that this article doesn't really fall into any particular category of writing that you may have covered in years before (persuasive, argumentative, expository, explanatory, informative, etc.). Rather, Delillo's writing seems to cover the tasks that each of those categories would have been solely responsible for. I'm not saying that this is the kind of writing I am expecting for you to produce in this class -although it'd be worth a try. What I want is for you to begin to see writing as the free-form expression it is. Delillo obviously has his task, purpose, and audience in mind while writing -but he is not restricting himself to a certain style or mode -at times his writing feels like an essay, and other moments feel poetic or like something out of a movie.

In closing, and going back to the main subject at hand, it's important to remember how much time has passed between September 11th. Last year with my class I pointed them towards a website:
http://www.911day.org/

With it, we discussed the idea of what we CAN do in our lives to move on forward with their lives while not dishonoring those lost. The website encourages people to make the day a positive experience by committing acts of kindness for the sake of those gone.

Moreover, at the end of this first season of the The Leftovers, the tone takes a decisive contrast in tone. Whereas the major bulk of the season dealt with the chaos and  raw emotions still prevalent amongst the people still alive, the final scenes find instances of hope amongst a few of them as they experience a moment of clarity in realizing that new life and rebirth can exist in the wake of the tragedy. Likewise, eventually in these classrooms, we will one day be visiting this topic with a group of students born on 2002 and so on -acting as further examples that we can and must move forward with our lives and not feel guilty about forgetting, but finding ways to honor those that have left.