This shocking memory should not become an obsession

12 April 2012
The Prime Minister wants us to remember how we felt on 11 September. Joan Smith says he's trying to distract us. It's important - and natural - to move on

Don't forget the terrible scenes we witnessed on our TV screens on 11 September: that is the message from Tony Blair, seven weeks after the terrorist attacks on the east coast of the US. In a speech today, the Prime Minister is taking the unusual step of listing what we saw and heard - planes crashing into the twin towers, heartbreaking messages from people who knew they were going to die - in an attempt to rally public opinion behind the war against terrorism.

His plea might have more force if it were not specifically linked to a course of action, the bombing of Afghanistan, that growing numbers of people in this country feel anxious about. By connecting the two things, he is inevitably laying himself open to the accusation of using other people's suffering for political ends. He is also, as far as millions of people who were not directly involved in the terrorist attacks are concerned, trying to halt a natural, healthy process.

People genuinely felt in the shocked aftermath of 11 September that the world would never be the same again. Yet there is already a surprised awareness of the way in which, after even the most gargantuan disaster, the rhythms of everyday life assert themselves.

This is especially the case when other tragic events, such as the deaths of Afghan civilians in bombing raids, demand our urgent attenseention. Even if that were not the case, we have arrived at the moment when the experience of grieving relatives and the rest of the world begins to diverge. For the bereaved, the process of coming to terms, not just with loss but the absence of bodies, will take years. For the rest of us, the original shock has begun to fade.

Some New Yorkers are beginning to say that they can barely remember the city skyline before the terrorist attacks, a testament to the ability of the human mind to adjust to the most shattering experience. We have been through this process before, with the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise, the Hungerford massacre, the Lockerbie bombing and the death of Princess Diana.

Smaller in scale than the attacks on the World Trade Center, these events nevertheless drove everything else out of our thoughts and discussions. For days and weeks after 11 September, the only subject of conversation was the collapse of the twin towers or the fate of the hijacked aeroplanes. This is a natural human response to shock. It is the mind's way of assimilating events that would otherwise be unbearable, leading to a kind of permanent paralysis.

But it is important to recognise that it is a process.

Most of us, in the past month, have been experiencing a gradual return to everyday life or at least a version of it. Now the Prime Minister is trying to make us feel the shock and horror all over again. "Never forget," he says, "those answerphone messages, never forget how we felt imagining how mothers told children they were about to die."

This is a fairly crude attempt to distract us from our proper concerns about the war. But let's think for a moment about what purpose would be served if we actually followed his instructions. Is 11 September to become the defining event in our lives, as previous catastrophes and massacres have been for people directly involved in them? Most of us sympathise with grieving parents who devote the rest of their lives to discovering who was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing, but we also have a sense that we are observing a tragic obsession.

Is that the model the Prime Minister is proposing? This is a peculiarly dangerous road, signposted with the words "double standards" and inviting the most odious of comparisons. Is the premeditated murder of 5,000 Americans worse than the bombing of Dresden or the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust? Why remember this event and not the murder of at least as many civilians by the Taliban in Mazar-e-Sharif in 1998?

Most of us feel uncomfortable with any such attempt at an accounting of grief. But there is a more subtle point here, about how we experience other people's suffering in the age of mass media. The Prime Minister is asking us to turn the clock back and allow ourselves to be flooded once again with the horrific details of the terrorist attacks on 11 September.

Many people did this at the time. They watched, over and over again, exactly the same TV footage: a plane approaching a skyscraper, engulfing it in flames, desperate people jumping from the resulting inferno, the building's terrible collapse. The fact that we had something like it before, at the movies, meant that we expected a different ending - Bruce Willis leading a ragged band of survivors to safety - and had our hopes dashed many times over.

Without realising it, viewers were trapped in a morbid cycle of disbelief, shock and disappointment. The effect was paralysing, leading to unrealistic demands for action, especially in the US, and to an exaggerated sense of personal risk. This is not to say that we should shy away from the multiple horrors inflicted in this world, but it is an argument for recognising the boundaries between genuine and vicarious experience.

This was a distinction brought home on the first anniversary of Princess Diana's death, when many people struggled to understand why they had been so intensely affected by the death of a total stranger. What the Prime Minister is proposing today contains within it similar dangers. Of course we should not forget the terrible death toll and suffering that occurred on 11 September. No one is suggesting that. But it is equally important, and necessary, to get them into some kind of perspective.

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