Driving to Virginia Beach for Sunday’s half-marathon, we passed a stretch of highway near the Pentagon that’s been renamed the “9/11 Fallen Heroes Memorial Highway,” or something like that. I can’t stress how stupid I find this to be. My friend Dave, who’s much smarter than I am, spends a lot of time thinking and writing about the way in which our memory of past events changes as the cultural landscape changes. He’s spent a lot of time at the Shanksville memorial site, doing research for what I’m sure will be a brilliant book, and he’s watched how the dialogue surrounding those events has shifted. I don’t want to scoop, so I won’t say anything else, but here’s what I think:
Some people did heroic things on that day. Fire fighters in lower Manhattan. The people on flight 93 who fought back rather than allow themselves to be turned into a missile. But most of the 3000 or so dead people aren’t heroes –they were victims of a terrible crime. They didn’t do anything heroic that day: they woke up and went to work. If they had done something heroic or extraordinary, their deaths would be, paradoxically, a lot more ordinary. Their deaths are extraordinary and terrifying because they were doing something utterly ordinary on that Tuesday morning.
