Should we forget 9/11?

I am French. I think this is how I should start this paragraph since it is my nationality—more than my name, my concentration or my class year—that has shaped me into having opinions that often differ from most of my American classmates. After one full year at Brown, I can now affirm that the time when I feel most French is not when I have my family on the phone sitting on my “fabrique en France” pillow in Buxton International House, but rather when I listen to debates in the various classes I have to take as an International Relations concentrator. In the context of this class, which I am taking because it seems to provide a crucial background to the studies of International Relations, I will try very hard not to be the stereotypical pessimistic and untactful French person. Instead, I hope to bring to our discussions the point of view of an outsider to the American culture.
Last week, Professor Der Derian asked us: “Should we forget 9/11”? Whether this is the “we” as American or the “we” as mankind, I believe that forgetting is not the right solution. First of all, it would be ethically wrong to deny to the victims of 9/11 the right to remain alive in our memories, and it would be humanly impossible to ask families of those who perished on that tragic day to simply “forget about it”. Second, it seems to me that the least we can do from such horrors that make entire nations feel powerless is to learn from them. I am not sure the United States has been successful at doing so. I would be tempted to say that America should not forget 9/11, but rather remember it differently.
On September 11th 2001, I was at school in Cairo, Egypt. Most of the students there were either American or Egyptian, and everyone shared a feeling of disgust towards terrorism. Then, when I went to the U.S. for the first time a couple of years later and told friends I had made that I lived in Egypt, they seemed worried and asked me if I could go to school without fearing for my life, and above all, if I was not afraid of my Egyptian friends. This question seemed ridiculous to me, and I am sure it seems ridiculous to students evolving in an international community such as Brown, but for my friends who had never been in the Middle East and had probably never met someone from that region (in many cases I was the first French person they had ever met), it did not seem unusual to make the connection between Arabs and terrorists. I am sure that most of the American population understands that this connection is clearly illegitimate, but if normal teenagers were lead into believing that it could be, then it seems to me that the post-9/11 America was somewhat suspicious of the Middle East in general. Now… could this be a reason why it did not seem morally wrong to declare war on Afghanistan and, later on, on Iraq, killing thousands of innocents in order to fight the war against terrorism? Was the chase of a handful of extremists a strong enough cause to attack entire nations? The memory of 9/11 and the misguided hatred that unfortunately derived from the tragedy seems to have, at times, impaired the United States’ ability to think critically.

Posted by Claire Vergerio on September 17, 2007 07:18 PM | Permalink

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