by Brett Yates
posted
Sep 22, 2011
Like many Americans, I spent September 11, 2011, watching
football - which seemed to me not an especially noble way to occupy
myself on the tenth anniversary of our nation's greatest tragedy,
but then again, for most of us, life, unfortunately, isn't about
being noble; for most of us, it's about stuff like watching
football. Anyway, while watching, I discovered something about
myself that I think would make me unpopular with a lot of people if
I admitted it, which is precisely why I feel that I have to admit
it to you.
Here it is: I'm really, really uncomfortable with most 9/11
tributes. As you probably recall, the National Football League ran
spots featuring Robert De Niro (who gravely intoned, "The NFL
remembers"), played "Taps," and unfurled giant flags. Uniforms bore
stitched-on ribbons; Rex Ryan wore an FDNY hat. You could hear
"USA, USA" chants from the crowd. And I know people enjoyed this,
but hear me out.
For ages, professional athletics organizations - especially the NFL
and the MLB - have self-servingly promoted a link between sports
and country. The idea is that, since football and baseball are
American games, played (much of the time) by American athletes,
watching them is an act of patriotism, like eating apple pie or
pledging allegiance to the flag. A Bengals-Browns matchup isn't a
meaningless helmet-bashing contest between millionaires: it's a
celebration of the USA, of all of us. With its culture of
patriotism, the NFL naturally had to plan something special for the
tenth anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center,
right?
What I believe is that the most respectful thing the NFL could have
done would have been not to mention 9/11 at all. No memorials, no
songs, no shots of firefighters or of the New York skyline. If
they'd wanted to pay tribute, they could have done so by
recognizing that football games - no matter how thickly shrouded in
red, white, and blue - are silly, insignificant things and have no
business involving themselves with tragedies. We don't build
Holocaust memorials inside amusement parks; we don't hold circuses
on top of graveyards.
There was a lot of talk on Sunday about remembrance, but the truth
about football is that it's not about remembering; it's about
forgetting. We watch football precisely in order to forget about
stuff like 9/11. The NFL designs tributes in order to assuage our
consciences about this: if we spend ten seconds in silent
commemoration of the dead, then maybe we won't feel so bad about
spending the rest of the afternoon drinking beer and going crazy
over famous, living people throwing a ball around. We're not doing
this for the victims of the tragedy - we're doing it for
ourselves.
Grieving is hard, but ceremonies are easy; one of the uses of the
latter, I think, is to absolve us from doing the former in a
thoughtful, difficult manner. If you want to spend 9/11's
anniversaries thinking about those whom we lost, that certainly is
commendable. If, on the other hand, you want to spend your 9/11s
watching football, well, then, let's at least admit what we're
doing. Let's not have our fun and say we're actually mourning. The
ceremonies don't really count.
One of the terrible parts about disasters in which a lot of people
are killed is that they leave the rest of us behind, alive, and
we're not better human beings afterward or more profound. The
majority of us remain trivial people who go about doing trivial
things and, for the most part, not thinking about all the horrible,
serious things in the world. To my mind, it's more honorable for us
to accept this and try to forgive ourselves - because, after all,
we're human, just like the deceased once were, and if they were in
our spot, they'd probably be living the same way we are - than to
try bolster our egos by injecting our trivialities with
faux-solemnity.
So, with that in mind, let's talk about Facebook. On Sunday, my
Facebook feed brimmed with somber tributes, nearly all of which
contained the phrase "Never forget." One thing I noticed about
these posts, though, is that none of them contained any real
memories or talked about any people; they merely paid brief
lip-service to the act of remembrance. The mourners had dropped off
their flowers and quickly departed, their duty publicly
fulfilled.
I confess that I actually got angry enough about this that I was
tempted to write snarky replies to my friends' statuses: yes,
snark, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 - I actually wanted to make
fun of these memorialists, contradict them, correct their grammar.
I wanted desperately to admit my triviality and thereby force
others, somehow, to admit their own. As some of my less thoughtful
friends began to switch their profile pictures to photos of the
Twin Towers and the American flag, I was, perhaps somewhat crazily,
on the verge of accusing them of actually enjoying 9/11 - they
liked feeling as though they were a part of an important historical
event. And probably this was a little bit true for some of them -
everyone wants to be a part of history - but it's such a hurtful
accusation that it really shouldn't be hurled around. 9/11 is a
complicated, confusing subject, and people's feelings are
complicated and confused; people aren't monsters.
There is a place, I know, for group mourning, for coming together
and sharing sorrow. Maybe Facebook, with its 500-character-maximum
status updates, isn't that place. But if we feel like saying
something, let's forgo another self-flattering "We'll never
forget." Here's my suggestion: "We spend most of our time trying to
forget, but sometimes we still remember."
Tagged:
generation y, Brett Yates
