What to do with the digital September 11

I came out this weekend with a Twitter feed chock full of 9/11 memorial links. Some went to top five mobile app lists for 9/11, many to articles from a variety of publications, and still others to event pages for vigils. My stream on Google Plus or Facebook was no different, filled with links or statuses about the 10-year anniversary of what Friday’s staff editorial described as a “defining moment for a generation,” likened to the Vietnam War and Pearl Harbor.

Yes, Sept. 11 was an influential event that shaped the policies and social trends of my generation’s childhood, but I find it hard to simplify the attacks to the equivalent of Pearl Harbor­—when our enemy was concretely defined and mobilized, not scattered and in hiding. Nor can I justify the comparison between Osama bin Laden’s assassination and V-Day; the difference between a symbol in two ambiguous wars and stopping a full-fledged, internationally recognized one. Yet, that’s what I saw when I scrolled through these same social media sites on May 1 last semester: one person after another reducing patriotism to a single sentence; articles these past few weeks making apologies in hindsight, but ultimately excusing the American people for any aberrating behavior from our noble and inculpable ideals.

We remember Sept. 11 not because it was the same as V-Day, or Pearl Harbor, but because we have cell phone videos and 24-hour news channels. We have the September 11 Oral History and Narrative Project and The National 9/11 Memorial featuring broadcaster recordings from relations of victims, first responders, and witnesses to the actual attack. We have the History Channel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Falling Man, and, of course, books and broadcast television remembrance specials and free coffee at Starbucks until 11 a.m. The New York Times ran an article called “Media Strive to Cover 9/11 Without Seeming to Exploit a Tragedy,” but I find that the real question hiding beneath all of this is, “How have we exploited tragedy?”

You can talk about the media as a separate entity from yourself, but you can’t remove it from the society it caters to, and the society that you are ultimately a part of. We rally around Sept. 11 as a reason for national unity, partially because any national tragedy deserves collective vigilance, but also partially because the way we have documented it makes it so. And in a few days time, for most of us the culmination of memorial snapshots are in danger of being just that: a stream of concentrated information that will dissipate in the much larger, more urgent news of the iPhone 5 and Justin Bieber’s love life. Technology has helped us remember, but not necessarily reflect.

I don’t think it would be presumptuous to say that many of us in the United States experienced the Sept. 11 attacks in the same way as our international counterparts: on television, safely away from the physical destruction and distress. I don’t think many of us can really say, after everything, that we understand completely what it means to grieve for a family member or friend who died that day, and to see that very personal loss reappropriated to serve as a veneer for national vengeance—a battle cry to avenge the illusion of American omnipotence and blamelessness.

Ernest Fenollosa remarks on poetry that “things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points, of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snapshots”; the stuff of our documentation is the skeleton of action, but this time I call for a different type of action. Instead of that same reflex for retaliation and violence, this action is the infinitely harder and deliberate act of acquiescing to humility, and searching for how we might humanize our enemies and their grievances toward us.

What entitles Americans to more retaliation for their grievances than say, those whose families die of starvation, or lack of disease control, or drug-related violence in other countries? Even in tragedy, we demonstrate our privilege. I write this not to lessen any convictions to love this country, but to rethink the policies that we enact from them.

This has been a decade of anger and revenge. Columbia students, more than any other part of our generation, need to pay attention. Older generations have left so many documents to sift through, thanks to the power of technology. We have the resources and hindsight to look at our past and present in an objective and, most importantly, humble way—for not just global collaboration but human understanding. Preventing the needless death of American citizens begins with international dialogue above homeland security. The knowledge we need for sympathy, for compassion and diligence, rests for us at the end of a Google search. History is only history when we call it so, and it would be a shame for us, of all these living generations, to restrict the part we play in its making to simply 140 characters.

Yanyi Luo is a Columbia College junior majoring in information science. Chipped runs alternate Tuesdays.