On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I had an 8:00 a.m. class to teach in an auditorium classroom at the University of Denver, where I’d been a faculty member of the philosophy department for nineteen years by then. As had by then long been my wont, to avoid the worst of rush-hour traffic from my home in Longmont through the heart of Denver to my office at D.U., I left to drive the forty miles to my office before 6:00 that morning. As was also my long-standing habit by then, I drove in silence, with no radio, and most especially with no “news” blaring from that source. Then when I arrived at my office, I used the time till my first class to do final preparation and attend to other class-related matters.

Accordingly, I did not have any idea about what had happened to the Twin Towers until I walked into the classroom for my class, only to encounter the stunned silence of my students. Having no idea what was going on, I asked the class what was the matter, and one of them—one sitting in the back of the auditorium, where he usually sat—said “Both Towers are down!” I had to ask him what he meant, and it was only when he explained that I learned of what had happened earlier that morning.

My own immediate affective response to hearing about the attacks came to me in a flash in all its complexity—as such responses to momentous events typically do, calling us to attend to them with care.  

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First and above all, I felt the shock of a sudden recognition, which immediately engendered a deep sense of shame. The shocking recognition was that for all the many years by then that I had been protesting against the idea of American exceptionalism, at a deep level I had been relying upon this country’s being somehow exempted from having to undergo the very sort of violent attacks as the one that had just taken place in New York.

I’d been to such places outside the U.S. as Munich, Germany, to give one prime example. “Terrorist” attacks had occurred there at the 1972 Olympic Games, and from then on there has been heavy surveillance at the Munich airport, replete with plenty of police armed with semi-automatic weapons. I’d even been stopped and frisked at Munich once, when leaving from there to fly back to Denver. So, I knew what such pervasive suspiciousness and hyper-surveillance looked and felt like. 

However, the news my students brought me of the attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11/01 brought home to me how deeply I had experienced this country, and myself as one of its citizens, as somehow protected against the same thing ever happening here. Thus, I suddenly realized that I had been counting on the very “specialness” of this country the whole time I criticized that very thing! 

That realization shamed me.

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Yet simultaneously with my unexpected, shameful realization came a sense of even less expected, uplifting hope. It was the hope that the shattering impact of the fall of the Twin Towers would call forth at long last some genuine national leadership—a leadership that would call upon our nation finally to face itself and accept responsibility for its standing in the world. Such true leadership would call upon us as a nation to ask ourselves openly just what we had done to bring on such hatred. What had we become to engender such reactions? Even more importantly, such authentic leaders would call upon us to ask what we needed to do to make amends for that harm we had done, and to re-establish fellowship with those we had so deeply harmed and offended that they would even kill themselves in their endeavor to express their hatred for us. 

I had never felt such hope for us as a nation before. That hope suddenly replaced the deep despair I had felt about my country since my teens. I dreamt at last that we might still redeem ourselves.

That shining hope was quickly extinguished. That light went out as I witnessed our nation’s so-called leaders do the very opposite to what I’d been surprised into hoping they might do. Instead of calling upon us honestly to take stock of ourselves, as we should have done, our presumptuous presumed “leaders” proceeded immediately to lead us even further and faster down the same old path of imperialist conquest and intervention in the affairs of other nations that had engendered such deep and globe-wide hatred for us in the first place. Hence, we immediately used “Never Forget!” as a slogan to reinforce our self-serving, willful blindness to what we really are and have done. We happily used the attacks that brought down the Twin Towers as a convenient excuse to invade first Afghanistan and then Iraq, and to interfere elsewhere—in Libya, for example--as our pseudo-leaders’ whims and our capitalistic corporations’ interests dictated. 

We should be ashamed!

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What we call historical memory is a creature of time and space. Emotional and political needs of the present intersect with past events. For memory, like perception, can never be simply factual. All are memories are reconstructions. Someone is doing the remembering and brings his or her personal history to the reconstructed event. The same is true of group memory, where collective struggles for meaning influence whether and how a particular event is remembered. 

—Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial

What we as a nation remember and what we as a nation forget shames us as a nation. Our memory does us no credit.