9/11 as History

At our church service this past Sunday, our associate pastor noted that while most of us could view the September 11th terrorist attacks as a defining moment in our lives, there was a large number of children in the congregation who saw 9/11 as history. These children were either not old enough to comprehend or remember the events of that day, or weren't born yet to experience first hand what it was like to be transfixed to the television for 24 (or more) hours straight watching real-time updates which were simultaneously terrifying and devastating.

All three of my children were born after 9/11, and my son asked me recently about the significance of the date. He wasn't oblivious to the fact that every time we turned on the television, there was this reference to the event - in addition to every major network, channels such as ESPN were doing special presentations on "How the Sports World Forever Changed with 9/11" and the Food Network had a feature on "Best Recipes of the First Responders". Okay, made the last one up, but you get my drift around how every network seeming had an angle on this.

I answered my son the best that I could, telling him that there were "bad people who hated the United States" who did some terrible things to kill Americans, and they did so by taking over airplanes and flying them into buildings. Of course, he had the usual follow-up questions as most 6 year-olds do, around how they got in the cockpit and why people didn't stop them, and I tried the best that I could to answer those. He seemed satisfied enough by my answer, and went on doing whatever he was doing.

The whole concept of "9/11 as history" is an interesting one. It's intriguing to think how someone who reads and hears around 9/11 processes it differently than someone who lived through it. To use some parallels, I never lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I read about it and learned about it in class. One who actually lived through the crisis may have been understandably far more cynical and nervous about Soviet nuclear proliferation than I would. It's one thing to read about practicing bomb fallout drills at school, but another thing altogether to help your dad build a concrete bomb shelter in your backyard anticipating an attack. But who's the one who's biased, and who is the one with the more rational and correct read of things?

In the same token, I wonder how living through 9/11 will contrast the way my son and I view the world. Will he be less jumpy when he hears a low flying airplane, or perhaps be less inclined to racially profile when he boards an airplane? I remember talking to a Korean friend many years ago who told me that there was a fundamental values clash with the Korean generation who fought and endured the Korean War, and the younger generation that did not. "The younger generation tends to be much more pro-unification, and some even blames the United States for driving a wedge between the countries," he said, "but the older generation who lived through the Korean conflict has a much more cynical and darker view to their countrymen in the north, having experienced their aggression firsthand." The point here isn't who is right and who is wrong, it's just illustrates how experiences color the values of a generation.

My children, thank God, have not had to live through an event as traumatic as 9/11, and I hope they never have to - though I have my doubts that this will come to pass. My hope is that their faith and their character will ultimately be strong enough to absorb whatever soul-marking experiences they may live through, learn and be shaped wisely and thoughtfully, and then keep walking hopefully and faithfully without being entangled in cynicism, apathy, pessimism, fear or hatred.