I remember September 11, 2001 very well. The whole day. From the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed I remember that day and probably always will. It was a defining moment in American history. If you were alive and cognizant at that time you probably remember what you were doing and where you were at when you learned that the towers came down, that they’d been hit, that thousands of people were thought to have died; and that was just New York, what about Flight 93 in Pennsylvania or the Pentagon. Granted, those don’t hold the same spot for me, but I remember where I was when all of the news started flowing in… and I remember that I wish I had something to do rather than sit in my apartment and watch the news because it was rather traumatic.
Yes. I realize that September 11 was about a month ago. That’s not what is important. We all have events in our lives that will forever be emblazoned on our memories. Movies, books, websites, people, smells, they bring those back. If you were alive in ’63 you probably remember what you were doing when you found out that Kennedy was shot. Go back further. If you were alive in ’41 you probably know what you were doing on December 7th when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Big events. Things that change the way we look at ourselves, at the country, at the world have an effect on our lives and we become forever changed by them.
However, with that said, there are events that people want to have a national impact and don’t. You know, I don’t personally care one wit about Katrina. Yes, I know people in Louisiana and along the Gulf Coast, but it didn’t really affect the nation. It affected New Orleans, it affected the state, and it broadly affected the region, but the devastation and loss of life from that natural disaster doesn’t affect me. I am not affected by it the way I was by 9/11. I probably never will be.
That does not mean that I feel nothing for those people, or anyone who has gone through a similar circumstance. But think about it. It was localized. It wasn’t an attack by some partisan militant group or person whom we are still trying to capture and/or kill. And it wasn’t something that affects the public as a whole. It just wasn’t that big a deal and I am sorry to those who feel that it was larger than it really is. New Orleans is a sinking city that requires levies to keep the water out and full-time pumps to move water out that creeps in. The city is destined to be claimed by the sea and all we are doing is staving off the inevitable. If a long enough power outage were to take place, if a large enough storm were to blow through, New Orleans would be lost and nothing anyone would or could do would bring it back. Louisiana got lucky this time.
People have events in their lives that shape them. That shape the way they view the world around them. I grew up in Texas. I was there when the Branch Davidean compound went up in flames. I can tell you where I was when I saw the smoke. Not on TV in real life. Looking out an open door, eating lunch, and watching a plume of smoke rising into the sky. Yes. I saw it. I was that close. However, for the vast majority of people in Texas, in Waco, in the world, they don’t have a clue as to what they were doing at the time. To me, it was over and I didn’t have to worry about my dad being called to go and man the lines at the compound. Turn to the TV, watch people race to put out the fires. Learn later that children suffocated in a buried bus as they tried to escape. Yeah. It defines a part of my life.
In ’92 there was lots of rain, flooding, and the local lake rose high enough to flood the backup spillway that the engineers that built the dam had put in place precisely for such a catastrophe. The world watched as the lakes in the region could no longer hold the amount of water being pushed into them by all the rain and then watched as the magnitude of water carved out the areas below the dams. I watched. I went and was a speculator as the water tore down roads and carved up natural areas. I remember. It defined a piece of my life. I even remember my mother hitting a bird, or was it the bird hitting the car, when we left from watching the water flow over the flood plain and down into the lowlands beneath it? Small things. Inconsequential activities that defined my life. They don’t mean anything to anyone except for me and to me they are emblazoned on my mind and come up, occasionally, when something reminds me of what is going on around me… in the world.
I don’t care about Katrina and didn’t when it happened. I was sad because people died. I was sad because people suddenly lost everything. But that storm doesn’t define a nation, it doesn’t define a presidency, and it doesn’t define how I reflect on 2005. I almost have to be reminded that it was last year. Otherwise, the storm falls into the same category as Ruby Ridge or a lot of other events and places and storms and disasters and other things that some people are defined by and yet mean nothing to me.
We all have events that mark us. For some they are mostly happy. Marriage. The birth of a child. Graduation. The drivers license. A first car. A twenty-fifth car. Lots of things. Some are bad. Deaths. Divorce. Moving. Graduation. Flunking out. The first car. The twenty-fifth car. You get the idea. We define our lives, or aspects of our lives, through events in them. Our minds hold onto the minutiae of detail and in the end we can remember exactly what happened on 9/11 because it defined you, it defined a nation, and it defined our view of the world.
I remember, rather clearly, the events that led up to my deciding to re-apply to BYU one last time. It got me to Utah. It put me in a position to make more informed choices now that I am here. And at the same time I remember where I was, what I was doing, who I was talking to, the approximate time of day, and (if I try really hard) the approximate day of the week when that decision was made. It defined me and no one else. You can’t ask the person I was speaking to, at the time, what they were doing and expect them to know. They were a passive participant in the experience. It meant something to me. It means something to me. And that’s the point: It means something to me. I can see the connections and the outcomes and I can see, in part, where the future will take me; but at the same time I don’t expect others to recognize this as something particularly special in their lives.
With that said, Katrina, no matter how much we want it to, will never define a nation. Looking back over history the Floods of ‘92 will not define the nation and mean something only to those who they directly affect. Natural disasters don’t define the nation and they never will. Your special events are most likely not going to define the nation. And yet, what I choose to ignore by making these statements is that want aspects of their lives to be recognized as more than the sum of its parts and as such the news and politicians and pundits look for events to try and make them national, to make them more important than they are, and in the end, they will fail and in five years most people (outside of Louisiana) will not remember anything about Katrina other than it was a name and that something happened, but what? Does it really matter?