Today is the tenth anniversary of the attacks in New York City and Washington...and the crash in Pennsylvania. Once again, we are told we will never forget, that we will remember forever. I doubt it. If there is one thing that Americans do best it is to forget and get on with things.
A couple of decades ago, I was at a dinner in Scotland. There was a bowl of water in the center of the table and when the host or one of his friends made a toast, they waved their glasses "over the water". They were royalists still waiting for the return of the Stuarts, their "rightful rulers", the last of whom lived "over the water" in France and remembering the battle of Culloden, that took place in 1746. There, the last Stuart to set foot on the island, Bonnie Prince Charlie, lost and fled. Over two hundred years later, these Scots were still obsessing about it. I suppose they continued that way until the last of the Stuarts, the Count of Paris, died.
The deadly Bosnian War with its ethnic cleansing, fought between Serbs and Croats in the former Yugoslavia during 1991-1996, was caused by a hatred that dated back to a battle a thousand years before. These were people who excelled at remembering, at never forgetting. A good thing? I think not.
In contrast, the Japanese and Germans are today American allies. We can buy products in our stores manufactured in Vietnam. We somehow managed to make friends of former enemies.
The Oklahoma City bombing is remembered only to those who lost family members or tourists who visit the memorial. So it will be in time in NYC and Washington, DC when the monuments are built and the anniversaries no longer celebrated.
Today, I asked a young woman at the aquatic center if she could tell me what happened on December 7, 1941, and she didn't have a clue. Even older people I talk to have no idea how many were killed at Pearl Harbor. Our history recedes. We forget. We move on.
That is as it should be.
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