Remembering 9/11

I was surprised to go online this morning and realize that I'd forgotten that today was 9/11. In past years, I've anticipated the approach of the anniversary of the attacks with nervousness--I was always scared to be in downtown DC, worried that Something would happen. This year, living in a new city, I had to make myself stop and remember what happened that day.

It made me realize that, for all of the instances I'm always searching out to explain the relevance of history, this day is an achingly clear example of a case where remembering the past matters. I watched an interview this morning with twin girls born on 9/11/01, and the reporter asked if they knew what happened the day they were born. One of the girls sighed in exasperation and said, "Yes, some planes flew into buildings." Is this all that the next generation will remember of this day? How, then, will they make sense of what has happened since?

Admittedly, Pearl Harbor can never have the resonance for me that it did for my grandparents. But the difference with 9/11 is that rather than having to transfer collective memories to archives after the fact, reactions in the moment were preserved through online archives. It's an expansive multimedia repository--the official one for the Smithsonian, in fact--that historians long into the future will use to tell the story of that day. And, hopefully, it's a story we'll each retell every year, reminding us of the way history carries on into the present.