11 DE SETEMBRO: FOI HÁ 2 ANOS...



Na newsweek:

GENERATIONS OVERLAP; MEMORIES stretch out across decades, even centuries. The Holocaust was one such event; so was slavery—both churning out their horrors over years, falling like hard shadows over many generations—yet they feel like single events because they sit like stone in our collective psyche. The Vietnam War is another, as is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
September 11 will never again be just a date on the calendar. We are still newly wounded, but as years pass we will process the memory differently. As with any wound, there will be healing, a smoothing over of scars and a reconnecting of torn nerve-endings. But what will never fade is the knowledge that something huge and horrible happened on that clear autumn morning. A challenge exists for people of every generation: how best to honor the memory of an event that seemed to throw earth off its axis—how to explain it, paint it vividly and authentically for the inheritors—those who are too young to possess their own memories. Already, there are children who will only ever know an empty hole in the Manhattan skyline, who can’t look up at that blue wedge of sky and see ghosts of the twin towers, who won’t have seared into their hearts the images of the day the towers fell.
History is a woven rope handed from one generation to the next. It’s often a sad task, taken on with uncertainty and prayers—and with an understanding that the future is molded by how the past is handled.
I was young—11 or 12, I think—when my parents showed me a black and white film of American soldiers going into the concentration camps in Germany at the end of World War II. The faces of both the rescued and the rescuers are indelibly inked in my mind. The strong hands of soldiers reaching tenderly for emaciated bodies, thin as matchsticks, yet moving, bending, understanding—life amidst so much death—taught my heart how to plant itself in the future and promise that nothing like this should ever happen again. Fittingly, that short documentary was called “Lest We Forget.”
My father had kept the film for years, and even though I was young I was old enough to understand that his intention was always to show it to his children at a time that seemed appropriate. So we could ask the questions that need to be asked even though there are no answers. So we could understand that out of horror can come heroism. So we could hold fast to the faith that even the blackest evil can’t extinguish the light of the human spirit. My mother has since told me that he was emphatically committed to showing us the truth of what happened when evil consumed a country and slaughtered so many. He believed he owed us that truth.
Ultimately, that is what the rope of history is made of – the strong twine of truth.
As years rumble on and we keep approaching the date of September 11 with tentative hearts (Where are we now? Who are we now?) I wonder how many families will sit in living rooms and look at film footage or photographs, diving into the deep wells of their children’s eyes knowing they will never be able to answer the questions pooled there. I can offer only this: the diving down is how the rope of history is grasped and passed on.
Who are we if we don’t pass on the truths about that one morning—that one moment in the time-span of history—when the sky billowed with smoke and the buildings crumbled and people jumped to their deaths and others were lost in the wreckage; when firefighters and rescuers raced into the flames, many of them perishing as well. Who are we if we don’t also say: ‘Yes, there were those in other lands who cheered and threw out candy like some macabre Mardi Gras celebration when they heard that some 3,000 Americans had died a horrible death. We didn’t look too long on their hatred. We turned back to each other.’ Who are we if we don’t tell our children, so they can tell their children, that while evil can turn the world to rubble—killing, maiming, crushing even the strongest hearts—it can never break the soul. Out of the rubble of the September 11 attacks, souls rose up. Some of them left this world to hover above us; others survived to embrace another day, another year—more time on this uncertain earth. More time to remind us of how resilient our souls really are.
A long time ago, I sat in a peaceful living room and learned the sad lesson of how violent and cruel human beings can be. I learned that there are no answers to the question, where does evil come from? I learned that there is an answer to how we rise above evil. We soar on the wings of our hearts. We find those wings by looking deep into the darkness and remembering that nothing can extinguish our souls. We find them by holding onto the rope of history, and pulling it into the future, emboldened by the faith that we can make it different from the past.
If we handle history carefully and truthfully, the empty hole in the Manhattan skyline will be filled with promises.