Hmmm....

The baton we carry, and the history we must pass on

For twenty-five years, I have largely resisted writing about September 11.

What could I possibly add?

The words have already been written. Millions of them. The photographs have been published countless times. The terrible images have been replayed until they are etched into the collective memory of anyone old enough to remember that morning.

And rightly so.

There are some events that must be remembered.

But this year I find myself wanting to write about September 11 for a different reason.

Not to recount what happened.

Not to revisit the horror.

And certainly not to dissect a metaphorical body that has already endured more autopsies than any event should have to endure.

I want to write about what happens when those who remember begin to disappear.

I recently watched a series of street interviews with young people being asked about September 11, 2001.

I found myself feeling terribly sad.

Not angry.

Sad.

Some knew very little about what had happened. Some appeared to have almost no knowledge of it at all.

And perhaps we should not be surprised.

Someone who is eighteen today was not born when those planes struck New York and Washington. September 11 is not their memory. It is history.

That distinction matters.

For those of us who watched it unfold, it is almost impossible to imagine a world in which someone could regard September 11 in the same way we regard the Battle of Hastings or the sinking of the Titanic.

But that is precisely what time does.

It turns memory into history.

And eventually, history into something that must be taught.

That is where my unease begins.

Because this isn't really an American problem. It isn't even a Western problem. 

It is a human problem.

Every generation inherits a world shaped by events it did not witness.

We inherit wars we did not fight, freedoms we did not win, borders we did not draw, mistakes we did not make and lessons that were often learned at a terrible price.

We also inherit warnings.

And warnings are of little use if nobody remembers what they were warning us about.

Before September 11, the Western world had grown accustomed to distance.

Terrorism existed, of course. Britain had its own long and painful experience. Ireland knew it intimately. The Lockerbie bombing had demonstrated with terrible clarity that terrorism could reach far beyond the places where it was born.

But somehow there remained an assumption that oceans, prosperity, modernity and geography provided a kind of protective shield.

The terrible things happened somewhere else.Somewhere far away. Somewhere we could watch on television and then turn off.

September 11 shattered that illusion.

For a brief moment, the world seemed to wake up.

It was rather like Rip Van Winkle opening his eyes after a very long sleep, looking around at the world and wondering what on earth had happened while he was away.

Except that the world had changed while we were sleeping.

Technology had changed.Travel had changed. The reach of people determined to do terrible things had changed.

Distance itself had changed.

The world had become smaller, while our understanding of it had not necessarily kept pace.

And for a time, we understood that.

We remembered. We mourned. We asked difficult questions. We looked at the world differently.

But twenty-five years is a long time.

Children have become adults. Adults have become grandparents.

Those who were young on September 11 are now approaching middle age. And those who remember it most vividly are getting older. That is the natural passage of time. There is nothing sinister about it.

But there is something profoundly important about what happens next. Because memory cannot simply be assumed.

It has to be passed on.

Perhaps that is what troubles me most.

I am not angry. I am almost afraid.

Not afraid of September 11 itself. That morning has passed into history. The people who died cannot be brought back, and nothing we write can change what happened.

What troubles me is what happens when those who remember are no longer here to remember. 

We speak of history as though it were something safely locked behind us.

Perhaps it is better understood as a relay race.

One generation runs for a while.

Then it turns and passes the baton to the next.

The baton is not merely a piece of wood.

It carries everything. The knowledge of where we have been. The scars of where we have stumbled. The lessons bought at terrible cost.

The stories of those who ran before us and did not make it to the finish.

Eventually, whether we are ready or not, the baton will be placed in our children's hands.

And what worries me is this:

If we have failed to tell them what they are carrying, how will they know why they are running?

If they do not know the history, how will they recognise the warnings?

If they do not know the sacrifices, how will they understand what must be protected?

And if they do not remember the terrible things that happened before they were born, how will they know when they are watching history begin to turn in the same direction again?

We cannot possibly know what tomorrow will bring.

We cannot know which decisions made decades ago will shape the lives of people not yet born. We cannot know which apparently distant event, mistake, warning or lesson will one day become desperately relevant to their lives. 

Because we cannot possibly know which lessons of our past will become desperately relevant to our future.

That is why we remember. Not because we are fascinated by tragedy. Not because we wish to live in the past. Not because remembering requires us to inherit every argument or every opinion of those who came before us.

We remember because history is the accumulated experience of humanity, bought at an often terrible price.

We are its custodians for a little while.

Then we hand it on.

September 11 must not become merely another date in an increasingly crowded history book. For those of us who watched it happen, it remains something more than history. It is memory. But memory fades.

That is why we must tell the stories.

We must teach the history.

We must encourage our children to ask questions, to read beyond the headlines and to understand that the world they inherited did not simply appear.

It was shaped by the triumphs, failures, sacrifices and terrible mistakes of those who came before them.

And perhaps that is the real meaning of Lest We Forget.

It isn't a demand that we live in yesterday.

It is a plea that we don't become so absorbed in today that we lose sight of tomorrow.

And I will remember the extraordinary sense of disbelief that swept across the world as we watched history being made before our eyes.

But I will also think about the baton. One day, the baton will leave our hands.

When that happens, I hope we have done more than simply tell the next generation what happened.

I hope we have told them why it matters.

Because we cannot possibly know which lessons of our past will become desperately relevant to our future.

So we remember.

We teach.

We pass the baton.

And when our turn is over, we trust the next runner to carry it forward.

Lest we forget.