Walking to the gym for my workout this morning, I saw a banner encouraging people to "Never Forget" 9/11. It occurred to me that there are several kinds of 'never forgetting'. One kind involves creating and transmitting histories for understanding and learning from what precipitates such terrible events so we do not repeat what precipitated them in the future. I agree with this kind of never forgetting. Another kind involves holding sacred and institutionalizing the blessed memory of fellow human beings who perished as a result. I also agree with this kind of never forgetting.Yet another kind involves holding a grudge, projecting our fears onto others, externalizing and seeking to control those fears in a way that can never work, by perpetrating violence against whole classes of people who were not and are not responsible. This kind of never forgetting is highly dysfunctional, for individuals and for the societies of which they are part, because it perpetuates the very violence to which individuals and society have already been subject. I wonder how much of the rhetoric of never forgetting is about that kind of memory, under cover of the others. We have a moral obligation to take great care in how we 'never forget', being sure it does not perpetuate the horror we ourselves have had to face. Our responses in the years since September 11, 2001 show a painful lack of skill in this regard.
