When a country pauses to mourn, it affirms how it lives, and has lived, as a body politic and a body spiritual. September 11, 2002, is drawing nigh.
Officials in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington DC are planning how to honor that day, how to bestow it with dignity and significance. In ways, a mission impossible. There are more ideas about how to mark this day than there are citizens. The sites are so different: a rural field, the Pentagon, the Pit at Ground Zero, and everyone’s hometown, everyone’s sofa.
Speeches, music, moments of silence, it’s all so appropriate, all so inadequate. Some strive for closure, for connection, for an assertion of American strength and resilience. We’re looking inward, plumbing the desire to remember.
Guests:
Jonathan Greenspun, Commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Community Assistance Unit
Richard McGraw, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs
Susan Hankinson, Flight 93 coordinator, Somerset County, Pennsylvania
Edward Linenthal, historian,
author of “The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory”