What does Never Forget mean if I was not alive to see the Twin Towers fall?
My father used to work in an office in downtown Manhattan, just a few blocks from the Twin Towers; only recently did I ask him to tell me about that day.
He happened to be starting his commute to the office when the first plane hit the North Tower. Like everyone else, he assumed it was a freak accident — a small plane making a low pass before the airport. He decided to stop in the midtown offices instead, thinking the downtown subway would be a mess. By the time he got off in midtown, the second plane hit, and it was clear the nation was under attack.
After the towers fell, he walked back to my family’s apartment, grabbed his camcorder, and filmed people sitting along Riverside, basking in the sunlight and looking on in horror as ambulance after ambulance rushed downtown, smoke rising against the blue sky.
His office would later be the last building torn down in the wake of the attack; his only recovered items were a small ceramic heart with my sister’s footprints and a cookie jar she and my brother decorated for Father’s Day.
This past Tuesday, I covered an event for The Daily Wire in downtown New York. Arriving early, I decided to make the trip to Ground Zero for the first time in my life.
It was a hot September Tuesday with clear skies — just as it was 25 years ago. As I walked north from the subway stop to the memorial, I took off my blazer and continued walking in the September sun. I saw young kids playing basketball in a park along the route. They were enjoying the last of summer before school resumed. Everything seemed peaceful; I could see the new World Trade Center towering in the distance as I walked north along the path.
And then I saw a disturbing open space, something totally irregular for the New York skyline.
I knew I had arrived at the site well before seeing the memorial, set at the base of where the towers once stood.
Before approaching the memorial, I put my blazer back on. Dread and reverence for the place overcame me. A tree with a wreath lay in front of it, surrounded by a low fence upon which families and visitors had placed notes with that same elusive promise to “Never forget.”
Another wreath lay at the base of the tower, flanked by posters of officers who had died.
I stood for a moment of silent prayer.
Then I noticed an entirely different crowd at the memorial — the selfie takers.
Seeing this juxtaposition, I stumbled on the answer to the question I and so many others my age have been asking ourselves.
Can you see something that happened to your fellow Americans as the same as something that had happened to your parents? Are you part of the same story?
As we approach the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I challenge each member of my generation to engage more meaningfully with our monuments and memorials than mere selfies. Monuments and memorials exist to transmit meaning and inspire reflection in subsequent generations. They are not fixations of frivolity.
We have agency to decide whether we will be a selfie taker or someone who links themselves with the broader story. As it turns out, the Israelites, ancient and modern, and the Founding Fathers both exemplify how to link oneself to a common historical memory.
For thousands of years, generations of Jewish grandparents, parents, and children have commemorated the Exodus, with the injunction to view themselves as if they themselves left the tyranny of Egypt.
For the Revolutionaries, the image of the Almighty taking the Israelites through the Red Sea served as a powerful engine for the American Founding. Benjamin Franklin proposed an image of Moses extending his hands over the Red Sea with Pharaoh drowning in the sea as the official Great Seal of the United States with the motto “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”
When the children of Israel finally passed into the Holy Land, Joshua erects a monument as a vehicle to transmit both a national memory and meaning:
He charged the Israelites as follows: “In time to come, when your children ask their fathers, ‘What is the meaning of those stones?’ tell your children: ‘Here the Israelites crossed the Jordan on dry land.’For the LORD your God dried up the waters of the Jordan before you until you crossed, just as the LORD your God did to the Sea of Reeds, which He dried up before us until we crossed. Thus all the peoples of the earth shall know how mighty is the hand of the LORD, and you shall fear the LORD your God always.” (Joshua 4:21-24)
The Israelites looked to the monuments and asked their elders what they meant, and they were told they marked the place where their God redeemed them, just as he redeemed them from Egypt. The monument promotes introspection and a recitation of where they are placed in that story, and ultimately it inspires both an understanding that memory is inherited and humility.
Similarly, we today must, as Americans, view ourselves as part of a broader tradition and inheritance; with that come patriotic and proud moments, but it also calls us to place ourselves within our national tragedies. This can look different for different people, but the Judeo-Christian tradition of historical recitation and familial bonds serves as a model for how we can remember what we never experienced.
As I stepped down from the monument, I decided to take a symbolic step backward before walking fully away, in recognition of the sanctity of the place, a step normally reserved by Orthodox Jews when moving away from the destroyed Temple Mount in the Holy Land.
Today there are some 100 million Americans who were not alive to see the Towers fall. I am one of them; but for me, at least, I have come to learn what it means to “Never Forget.”
.png)
.png)
