It’s pretty safe to say that, if you were over the age of 6 when 9/11 happened, pretty much no matter where you lived, your life was affected in a memorable fashion. I remember when I first learned about the attacks quite clearly - I started my car to move it out of the way of my roommate’s car (his car was in the driveway, my car was behind it) and the radio came on. The morning talk show that I listened to at the time was not doing its usual humorous routine - instead, they were talking about some attacks on New York and the Pentagon, which I thought was rather strange. When I realized they were being serious, I parked my car, ran inside the house, and turned on the TV. This led me to head down to Radio Shack (where I worked at the time) to get a decent shortwave radio to listen to events as they unfolded, only to find the entire store packed with people trying to get cell phone chargers and radios themselves. Even though it was my day off, I manned the register for an hour and cleared some of the crowd; I would’ve stayed longer, but I had to give my ex-wife a ride to work.

My ex worked in a music store in Reno. Her coworkers were what you’d expect from art enthusiasts - relatively liberal, most of them quite young. The entire store was buzzing with news about the attacks, and a couple of people brought portable TVs to watch the coverage. One coworker, however, was not interested in the coverage - I forget who he was, but he kept wandering around the store exclaiming his disgust for the coverage and wondering when the “circus” would end, or something to that effect. He even started turning off TVs after a short while.

I’m telling this story because it highlights an interesting divide that has been present ever since the attacks first occurred. There are some people for whom the coverage was something of a fetish - they felt compelled to watch hour after hour of it, day after day, even after the talking heads were just repeating themselves, over and over. I noticed the same thing during Katrina, too. There were also some people, few at first but eventually growing, that couldn’t stand the coverage and found the entire ordeal disgusting.

Now that it’s been six years since the 9/11 attacks, and since we’re still in war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the big question is this: How do we observe 9/11? Do we go all-out like we have in the past? Or, do we almost pretend it never happened at all? Both sides have their detractors, of course. Many conservatives wonder why we don’t remember it better. Others would almost rather it didn’t exist, and don’t wish to scare the children with it.

A useful comparison here might be to compare 9/11 with how the nation reacted to Pearl Harbor. However, this comparison can only go so far - there weren’t as many news outlets back then on which the news could be rehashed over and over, and even if there were, we were done with World War 2 in four years. Our generation, on the other hand, is stuck in a counterinsurgency, and those are never done within four years, unless you’re the British and you’re talking about one of the Boer Wars. Even then, the British resorted to using concentration camps to win that one in a “hurry”, which is something that we (thankfully) are not willing to do. Also, how do we know whether we’ve won or not? Even if Iraq is pacified, Osama bin Laden is captured, and Afghanistan becomes a stable island of peace in Central Asia, all it takes is one crazy person to inflict disproportionately deadly force on the American people. In short, we’re at war against an idea, not a nation, and ideas never die.

It’s because of the uncertainty of the war, its goals, and our actions to date that we’re increasingly uncertain about how to observe 9/11. It’s not the only day that we’re uncertain about, though. Ask Americans about these dates:

- May 7th: The sinking of the RMS Lusitania. This would eventually drag us into World War I, which would set the stage for the next 90 years of American history.
- October 24th: The day usually credited with the beginning of the October Revolution, which led to the Bolsheviks coming into power in Russia. This event would eventually lead to the Cold War.
- August 23rd: The day the Berlin Wall fell.
- December 17th: The day the Soviet Union formally dissolved.

There is an old adage I read somewhere that goes along the line of, “In Europe, 100 miles is far away. In America, 100 years is a long time ago.” As time passes, our ability and desire to effectively remember 9/11 will undoubtedly decrease as we all move on with our lives. Whether we ever are able to definitively prevent another 9/11 from occurring, however, may be a different story. We can only hope.