On Visiting the 9/11 Memorial and Museum
Over Labor Day weekend, I visited New York for the first time in a few years, and made a point of taking a guided tour of the September 11 Memorial and Museum. In keeping with my personal experience of 9/11 as an NYU frosh and the subsequent years, I was most struck by two elements from the museum and its displays.
First, there was very little I hadn’t already seen or heard before. The photo collections of people watching the burning buildings from blocks away, the video footage from documentary film crews and security cameras that captured each plane hitting the towers, audio recordings of people calling loved ones, news footage galore… Perhaps because I was in downtown Manhattan that day, I’ve been particularly motivated to seek out this stuff, and so it was a bit like going to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in that I wasn’t learning much new information, but I learned more about my own emotional attachments and reactions, and about other people’s experiences from the day and how they react to the memorial.
Eventually, it was too much. I harbored a small thought that perhaps I would appear in a photo or video from Washington Square Park, but I didn’t see my 18-year-old self. And I didn’t see any footage from the TRL episode following the attacks where I was in the audience. (If you have access to that full episode, please get in touch twentyninesunset@gmail.com.) Once those thoughts subsided, I was overcome with sadness for the people who suffered horrific deaths, the people who were left behind, and then the people across the world who suffered and died because American leaders sought to punish their enemies instead of working toward a safer and more prosperous world.
I couldn’t keep looking around. I felt incredibly small seeing other people with headsets on, peering at objects and videos and photos. Someone saying he was in kindergarten in Wash Heights at the time. Someone else saying he was in high school. Someone else speaking German. People crowded around a display case holding singed papers from Cantor Fitzgerald. I pushed through the second half of the main timeline exhibit without taking much in.
The second thing was that it reinforced how hard it is for me to understand other people’s reactions at the time. I keep learning that people who were high school students in, say, Florida stopped all classes and watched cable news with their teachers the rest of the day, or that schools in North Carolina went on lockdown. I don’t know why I feel those are nonsensical reactions, but I do, probably because I don’t have access to the specific kind of fear those people may have been feeling and I default to discounting how fearful people in the vast majority of the country could reasonably be, given that they were unlikely to be targeted. At the same time, I recognize that’s unfair, because fear doesn’t necessarily follow the paths and contours that any one individual expects.
My main takeaway from going to the museum was that the program and exhibits effectively strike a somber tone while also straightforwardly presenting facts and artifacts in a way that does not fall into a jingoism trap, or a New York Exceptionalism trap, and neither demonizes nor downplays the choices and motivations of the terrorists, themselves — granting that I may have missed some things as I hurried for a place to look down and breathe. I found that spot just outside the gift shop, perhaps because it was the one element of the museum that didn’t seem to fit, and thus I could reach a different headspace.
Later in the weekend, I talked with my college friends about 9/11, and while there was plenty of overlap to our recollections of the day, they also described very different experiences than I had. One person said their parents had to be talked out of driving halfway across the country to pick them up and take them home, for example, something that I don’t recall I ever considered or that my parents ever brought up. It was yet another reminder that our various experiences are shaped by more than just what we see and hear from given vantage points, but our full contexts, relationships, and fragmenting memories in the aftermath.
I’m glad I went to the museum. It was worth visiting. I have no interest in returning and putting myself through it again.
(Photo: "9/11 Memorial Museum - Fountain" by edward stojakovic. Used under CC BY 2.0 license.)