A note on the passage of time
There’s been some bitching here about all the hoopla about the 9/11 anniversary. People have been doing that since the first one back in ’02. It seems that one of the things these people don’t understand is the passage of time….
When I was a kid, my dad’s BFF’s wife had an extremely elderly grandmother in a local nursing home. I met her once. One of the stories she would tell was how her grandmother had met Napoleon during his invasion of Russia when she was a little girl. That means that there’s three degrees of separation between Me and Napoleon.
On the day of his inauguration in 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt went to the home of former USSC Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. When he was a young man, Holmes had fought in the US Civil War and had actually met Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln in turn, had met former President John Quincy Adams during his only term in Congress in 1848. Adams, had met pretty much all of the major founding fathers.
That’s four degrees of separation between George Washington and FDR.
What does this have to do with 9/11? The memory was still ALIVE. Thus it is with this: All adult natural born Americans have experienced it. Everyone working in the media was either there or watched it on TV at the time it was happening. Everyone over the age of 14 has some memory of it.
It’s only been ten years. The local and national media is full of people who were THERE and have first person memories of the event, and there are millions of people who know someone who do. For those who were physically there, the trauma is still there to some extent, and never will be gone.
Some months ago, the last American veteran of World War ONE died, that got LOTS of coverage. But it was out of the blue and fuzzy. People remember WWI vets, hell, people remember CIVIL WAR vets. What’s close to you, you remember. People and events, which either you were physically were there for or a first hand or second had account.
In 2004, the three major American cable newschannels covered the ceremonies commemorating D-Day SIXTY years before. The leaders of the countries that formed the pre-UN UN were physically there.
Why? Because D-Day is still a vital part of the lives of thousands of people, and memorializing is important. That’s why the sesquicentennial of the Civil War is somewhat muted. Nobody living was there and few still personally remember the vets and their stories.
Time doesn’t heal all wounds, but it dulls them. Ten years for something this big is NOT enough for most people. However, there probably won’t be anywhere nearly as much fuss next year, and maybe not in 2021 or even 2026. Time passes, but not yet enough.