By Tony Curzon Price & Jessica Reed
Next week will mark 9/11's fifth anniversary, which the global media will cover and analyse extensively. openDemocracy will try to understand its sad legacy by holding a panel discussion in London; '9/11: looking back and forward' will reflect on the two hours that shook the world and prompted the emergence of the (so-called) 'War on Terror' political area.
But one can wonder why we, as nations, feel the need to commemorate, grieve and remember the anniversaries of tragic events. It may be that, for better and for worse, they are symbols of our universally shared history - hundreds of millions of different memories and personal stories are cemented together around that day. After all, every single one of us is able to remember where we were and what we were doing when hearing about the attacks. How many times did you have a conversation starting with those words: 'How and where did you learn that the Twin towers were collapsing?'.
Tony Curzon Price offers his own explanation of the modern fetishisation of anniversary-coverage in this blog entry:
Last week Katrina was 1, and next week 9/11 will be 5.
What sort of strange numerology grips us? 1, 5, 10 times 365 days of them - unless that includes a leap year. And why not the 100th day, or the 10th versery of 182 day periods? It's been 1820 days since 9/11, so let's remember it.
Veterans and survivors often suffer "Anniversary Reactions" when the anniversary of an event brings on flashbacks, reliving and the primal reactions of freeze, flee or fight. Trauma stamps its lessons on brains and minds, and anniversaries rekindle patterns of behaviour that might be entirely adapted to the original disaster, but not to its mere memory.
Maybe this offers a clue as to why our remorseless anniversialising is not so stupid after all: it is a social version of traumatic learning. The body-social needs to rehearse what it all together should do, should have done, and what we all have learnt. Only a simultaneous act of remembrance allows this to become an act of truly social learning.
And this, of course, is why anniversaries become political: if we socially learn, the lesson will be fought over. In 1994 Mitterand refused to invite Kohl to the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings; was Chirac right to invite Shroeder to the 60th? What has changed in those 10 years? This particular scar on the body social has healed somewhat, the memory of trauma replaced by more constructive hopes.
So even as the media feasts on the aging memory, we should mark the attitude we all together ought to have to the trauma, and spend a moment hoping that day 3652 will offer a better vantage.
Elsewhere: Niall Ferguson asks whether or not the US overreacted to 9/11 in theTime magazine piece titled The Nation That Fell to Earth: "It's the year 2031--one generation removed from Sept. 11, 2001--and Americans are commemorating the 30th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington (...)" + Are we then part of the 'Generation 9/11'?
