September 11, 2001 was a beautiful day in the New York City area. Clear blue skies, the heat and humidity of summer having finally cleared away in time for back to school. I was 15 and had just started my sophomore year of high school. Even 20 years later, the memories seem fresh - having been recalled again and again in my mind ever since. They're easy to remember.
It's easy to remember the stricken look on teachers' faces. The TV in chemistry class eventually switched on. The other students panicking about loved ones. The gasps in the school bus as it climbed the bridge over the New Jersey Turnpike and we all caught sight of the massive cloud of ash and smoke for the first time. The bright glare in the sky every night for weeks and months as the debris was sorted in an old landfill just across the river, workers searching for human remains night and day.
It's easy to remember the people killed that day, each life, cruelly taken, setting off a supernova of grief, each one a point of light in a galaxy of violent loss. Easy to remember the heroism of the first responders, the firefighters and others who selflessly ran into the burning towers trying to save lives.
It's hard to forget the weeks that followed. The weeks in which the government and media convinced people in rural Nebraska that they too had been attacked, that they too could fall victim to Islamist terrorists at any time. That vengeance must be had, that vengeance could bring back some illusive feeling of absolute security and Pax Americana. Hard to forget the American Muslims (and people others took for Muslims, particularly Sikh men) attacked and even killed by their fellow Americans in the weeks and months that followed. Hard to forget the first invasion, and the next a couple years later. Hard to forget the hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan who died violent deaths so that Americans might sleep soundly at night. Hard to forget the soldiers, serving their country and looking forward to having college paid for, dying because the US government didn't prioritize body armor for working class volunteers. Hard to forget the teenagers I work with whose families fled Iraq and Afghanistan, forced to leave their homelands in search of security elsewhere.
Every anniversary of 9/11 is a complicated day for me, a strange mix of sadness and anger and even shame. 20 years later, I don't need flag waving or slogans to remember those we lost or the heroism of those who gave their lives so others might live, showing us all the best of who we can be as humans - remembering that is easy. But it's also hard to forget everything that has come since, everything that has shown us the worst of who we are as well.
So today let's remember, but let's also not forget.