It was bound to happen. This week, during a discussion with my class about September 11, I found out that their memory of the attack on the World Trade Center is pretty vague, and that the memory of it may be as “real” to them as World War II – something that happened a LONG time ago, and that only old people care about.
I know I don’t watch as much TV as most people, so I don’t know how much 9/11 coverage there was. The only thing I’d heard at all was a Democracy Now broadcast on the truck radio that featured StoryCorps interviews with relatives and friends of people who were killed in the attack. It brought back a lot of sad memories.
One of my students asked, “Why do we have to talk about this each year?”
I was stunned.
I asked the class, “How old were you in 2001?” Nobody was quite sure, so we worked it out, and I realized they weren’t in kindergarten yet. They were four years old, too young to remember it very well. I told them that we study history in order to make sense of the world we live in today, and that we’d return to the topic later, when we had more time. There was too much to talk about, and we needed to begin Math.
Throughout the day, I kept thinking about this. How can we understand Al-Qaeda? Osama bin Laden? airport security? the war on terrorism? Afghanistan? thePatriot Act provisions, or the war in Iraq, where some of my students’ parents are now deployed, without talking about September 11, 2001?
This is the world now. It all happened during the time these kids have been in school. It’s the only world they know, and it’s a mess. We need to start connecting the here and now with what came before, but the problem is that Facts in the political universe are just irrelevant “details,” used selectively, twisted, or even just made up. Truth goes down the memory hole when the McCain campaign simply smothers it with lies, and rewrites history.
It’s easy to see it happening here in Alaska, with just about everything our governor has said to the national media about her “executive” experience. Les Gara, former assistant Alaska Attorney General, and state legislator, says that the McCain campaign has (metaphorically, at least) brought Karl Rove to Alaska to interfere in the Palin “troopergate” investigation, playing politics-as-usual:
….Then McCain’s staff of outsiders came to town. And they began to launch personal attacks on people I respect. They started proving that the same old politics that have caused dissatisfaction with Washington-insiders these past eight years are going to be the bread and butter of the McCain campaign….As an Alaskan I’m not really angry at our governor for this mess. I do blame John McCain for the ugliness he’s brought to our state this week. His folks have come to my small state to attack my friends, and people I respect, for political gain.
I don’t entirely agree. Palin is as responsible as anyone for telling the truth. Her lies are as inexcusable as McCain’s.
12 Comments
Your story is wrong. Les Gara is one of the most partisan of all Alaskans. And he was NEVER Attorney General. He was a hired hand in the prosecution of the Valdez case and a Deputy.
Get your facts right. Your and his lies are inexcusable. Lying by omission is inexcusable as well.
Ok, he was an assistant attorney general. Thanks. But I wasn’t lying.
And who isn’t partisan around here, now? Palin’s speech at the RNC made it clear why she was on the ticket. The investigation is still bipartisan, though, like it was to begin with.
Doug, since I’m in NYC my experience with students in 9/11 is probably different than yours in Alaska. Every year on the anniversary I have talked about it with my students and it has been interesting to see what they know. This year, as I anticipated, the kids were really too young to remember it first hand (although a couple claimed to nonetheless). However, it continues to loom large here. — a couple of kids lost family members and friends and one got tearful during our discussion.
I expect that those who remember 9/11 will do so as those who remember Pearl Harbor or (in the case of my family) Kristallnacht in Germany. I think that it is really important as we teach history to kids that we do consider that they have a different relationship with these sorts of events (not a firsthand one) and take it from there.
I should also say that I think it is really important not to be surprised by what kids don’t know. As I alluded to above, my family is German. Most had to leave Germany and/or were killed (or, in a couple of cases, killed themselves rather than being deported to Poland), but quite a few more distant relatives still are there (as their families had converted generations earlier). I also have close family friends there and lived there as a child. I’ve always been interested in how children of the post-war generation learned about the Holocaust and how it was taught in school. Those in their late twenties and early thirties were taught it, but it became a sort of predictable thing, I suspect a bit like the US with slavery. I think that we need to be comfortable with kids not knowing and be really careful about not judging them for this, but helping them begin to know.
Monica, thanks for this. I wasn’t surprised by the students not knowing, but by the not-wanting to know, or hear about, what happened. I spoke with a kindergarten teacher about this, and was reminded that what we say about it depends a lot on the age of the kids and their ability to understand. For me, I’m curious now to learn what they already know about 9/11, and what it means to them. Presumably, they’ve been hearing about it in school every year since it happened. It’s a sensitive subject for a lot of people, and it’s hard to know what to say until you know who you’re talking to.
Hi Doug,
9/11 is also being recast historically. I highly recommend “Real Heroes, Fake Stories” (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/opinion/14farmer.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=%20september%2011%20commission&st=cse&oref=slogin) by three staff members of the 9/11 commission. I totally agree with the writers that reworking true stories to make folks who weren’t into heroes diminishes those who truly were heroic. But, sadly, isn’t this always the way history is written?
Hey Doug,
I’d encourage you not to leave this subject off the docket (not that you would– only that our best intentions do so easily get swallowed by, “and we really have to begin math,” don’t they?) One of the most memorable conversations I ever had in 6th grade was with my loving and brilliant teacher Miss Mulderry, who stopped a history lesson to give us a five-minute rundown of the Middle East conflict.
Also, if you give your negative student a safe space for being negative (and again, I’m sure you do), I bet he could reel off some very revealing and important reasons for not liking to discuss 9/11. “People get too emotional and I don’t like that.” “I don’t have any connection to this that’s been made obvious to me,” and so on. I suspect, however, that it may not be anything more innocuous, albeit very sad, than history usually being as dry as dust in school– and 9/11 is certainly history to this generation. I have to square this with my own experience– remembering the very texture of the table where I supervised study hall when I heard about the planes, in the school where I still teach.
On a lighter note, big congrats on your NYTimes gig. Well-deserved.
Doug,
I highly respect your point of view, and enjoy reading your blog regularly. I do agree that the slams in the ads you posted above are easily classified as “politics as usual”, but I do wish you would recognize the “politics as usual” aspects of both political parties. Up to this point, I had you pegged as staunchly independent from the “big two” parties, but your past few posts really spell out what side you’re on, and the revelation is a bit of a disappointment to me. Isn’t it obvious that the “big two” play the fighting game in public but actually spend most of their time working together on the back end to throw me and you under the proverbial bus?
When I see the governor of my state repeatedly offer the same misleading campaign slogans as examples of her fitness to govern, despite what I know to be the case, it pisses me off. Her speech at the RNC prompted me to make my first, ever, donation to a political campaign. She is an embarrassment to our state. I am not a Democrat, but I don’t see them dishing out BS with shameless disregard for the truth as McCain/Palin. McCain seems to have no integrity, whatsoever, in his willingness to say or do anything to get elected, including choosing her as his running mate. Some of the attacks against Palin have been ugly and unfair, I agree, but they haven’t come from the Obama campaign.
If you’d like me to say that the Democrats have had a hand in a lot of the stuff that’s wrong now, OK. They do. So what?
Maybe you’d like to offer some examples, Tim, of what you’re talking about. I’m curious, too, why I should feel any obligation to remain neutral, on my own blog, when I’m reacting to a couple of candidates for high office who seem to think that people will believe whatever they’re told, no matter how blatantly false it is.
First, I’d like to point out that you shouldn’t feel the need to remain neutral on your own blog. None of us are neutral, including the press. If you were neutral, you’d likely be a boring read. However, your freedom to express your reactions are countered in this case by my freedom to express my disappointed in those reactions. In other words, I appreciate your honesty on this blog, but I don’t appreciate your point of view in this case. I expected something different than what I got, and it’s my right to wish it weren’t that way.
As far as examples, Doug, there are plenty on both sides, but since you seem interested in only pointing out those on one side, I will stick to the other in this post.
Obama promises that he will pay for his incredible spending proposals by closing tax loopholes. Independent analysts (and anyone else with common sense) know that Obama’s plans will require either a significant raise in taxes or a significant increase in the budget deficit.
Obama runs his entire campaign on the idea of change in government as usual, and points out that McCain is “no maverick” because he has voted to support President Bush’s policies 90% of the time. All the while, Obama’s short tenure in the senate sports a voting record that agrees with the Democrats a whopping 97% of the time. Where’s the change in that?
In one ad, Obama’s team (not the press) claims that two key McCain campaign advisers currently lobby for special interests. In reality, both advisers, Charlie Black and Rick Davis, are former lobbyists, not current ones. There’s an outright lie.
All of the information above was taken directly from the latest Time magazine, a fairly liberal rag if there ever was one.
Listen, I understand that Palin representing herself as “Alaska’s Own” while lying through her teeth to the rest of the uninformed country is totally irritating to you. I venture to guess that there are people in Illinois feeling the same way about the same type of thing with Obama. I have to believe that there are people in Obama’s FORMER church who are pretty ticked off about him disowning them and their pastor publicly and claiming that he never really knew what the pastor stood for, even though he attended there regularly for 20 years. If that is not a lie, then Obama is a total idiot – and I don’t think Obama is a total idiot.
My hope is that you would acknowledge that there aren’t just “a couple” of candidates that are throwing lies around the country.
OK, to stay even-handed in truth-squading the candidates, here’s factcheck.org’s summary of The Whoppers of 2008.
I agree with Tim Goree that Obama is not a total idiot, and I also should say that his pandering to conservatives annoys me, as it does other people whose views are far out on what is now seen as the radical left. My expectations for an Obama administration are not especially high. But he beats the alternative, as I see it now.
I am not, however, as charitably inclined toward McCain/Palin, as Tim is toward Obama. If I haven’t already made it clear, I believe John McCain is nuts. I suppose some people call that “being a maverick.”
Thanks, Tim, for reading my blog. And thanks for reminding me of why I was so unhappy with Obama a couple of months ago. I’m sorry to disappoint you, or any of my readers, but McCain and Palin bother me way more than Obama/Biden. Way. More.
On your earlier point about who’s throwing who under the bus, I read somewhere today that it’s getting awfully crowded under that bus. I’m with you on that one.
Doug,
I like how you covered the “memory hole.” Though most generations still remember 9-11 crystal clear, we have to remember that the younger generations might not even have been alive yet. I’m not big on politics, but I don’t think that the past should be covered up. It happened, period. We need to accept it and move on.
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