Every year on 9/11 people gather in down town Manhattan where the friends and relatives of the victims of 9/11 are commemorated. The event centers on a recitation of the names of every victim of 9/11. The original list contained only those who actually perished on that day but over the years, names of those who are thought to have died as a result of their work during the recovery (who presumably became ill from exposure to toxic dust) have been added to the list. Although the victims of 9/11 have every right to whatever expression of their grief they are comfortable with, the commingling of public and personal mourning suggests a troubling societal response to the trauma of 9/11.
In the Wall Street Journal today, Peggy Noonan reports on how 9/11 continues to effect a coterie of young people, now college age, whose "bubble of childhood safety" was shattered on 9/11. Her story is quite moving and should be read in full, but I want to focus on a particular young man's responses to her questions:
The attack was not only an American event. Robbie, an 18-year-old freshman, was 10 and in primary school in England. "We were near the end of school. There were murmurs from teachers about something happening. I remember going back home, and my mum had both televisions on with different news channels. I remember the tower and the pillar of smoke. The big pillar of smoke was very vivid to me, and my mother trying to explain the seriousness of it. I think 9/11 brought us bang slap into the 21st century. I remember when the millennium came people said 'new time, new world,' but 9/11 was the 'new time, new world.' I understood it was something big, something that changed the world."
Then he told me that after we had talked the previous evening, he'd had a dream. "I was back in my old school in England, and in front of me I could see the city of Bristol, nothing distinct, but big towers, big buildings. And I could see them crumbling and falling. There was a collective fear, not just from myself but amongst everyone in the dream. I remember calling in the dream my mum, and saying 'Are you safe, are you safe?' I think this perhaps shows that after 9/11 . . . as a small child you felt safe, but after 9/11, I don't think I personally will ever feel 100% safe. . . . I think the dream demonstrates—I think the dream contained my hidden feelings, my consciousness."
He remembered after 9/11 those who rose up to fight terrorism. Even as a child he was moved by them. There are always in history so many such people, he said. It is always the great reason for hope. [Emphasis mine-SW]
Robbie intuits something powerful about our responses to trauma. First a brief digression.
Trauma refers to assaults on the body and/or mind which destroy the body and/or mind's homeostasis and whose effects reverberate until the previous homeostasis is recovered. If we confine our concern to psychological trauma, in layman's term, a trauma occurs when an event or events overwhelm the ability of the person to cope. The effects persist until they are able to recover their coping mechanisms.
In children there is a classic response to trauma that most child therapists are familiar with. The children will engage in repetitive play in which the important people in the traumatic event are controlled by the child and replay the script of the event incessantly. A child who has been traumatized by emergency surgery for a ruptured appendix, for example, might play over and over, at home and in the therapist's office, a scene in which a character is smothered by an evil monster who then kills the character's best friend. This is a minimally disguised and displaced enactment of the child's experience of losing (contact with) his mother as he is wheeled away by masked strangers and then his terror ay having a mask placed over his face before losing consciousness. (Today, the parent is usually encouraged to come into the operating room with the child and the doctors will defer putting on their masks until the child is asleep. Most children's hospitals have a much better understanding of what makes surgery traumatic than in the past.)
The child's repetitive, even compulsive play, represents their attempt to master a trauma by turning the passive experience of the trauma into active control over the traumatic situation. Passivity is a core aspect of trauma and mastery requires assertions of active engagement and reparative efforts in response.
It strikes me that the near compulsive reading and re-reading of the names of the victims does not in any way allow the readers or the listeners to turn passive into active. Robbie remembered those who fought against the terrorists, not the victims of the terrorists. It is certainly appropriate for the actual victims of 9/11 to be remembered, but mourning and remembrance is a private affair and should not be a celebration of their victimhood but a remembrance of their life. There is no opportunity for such remembrance in the public displays of 9/11.
Our culture has spent too much time in the last 8 years criticizing those who act for all their missteps. Those who take a passive stance are less likely to be criticized; after all, sins of commission are always more easily noted and criticized than sins of omission. Yet by allowing ourselves to remain in a passive position, we make it harder to metabolize the trauma and move on from it.
In a perhaps salient metaphor, 8 years after 9/11, the site remains a giant void in down town New York. Work has barely begun on the replacement for the World Trade Center Towers. Along with all the logistical, legal, and bureaucratic barriers to progress on the construction of an answer tot he 9/11 terrorists, I wonder if on a deeper level our embrace of passivity and the prolongation (indeed, the celebration) of trauma, is not an unrecognized, unconscious element of our inability to rebuild.
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