“THE TRIBUTE IN LIGHT” is a commemorative public art installation that was first presented six months after 9/11 and then every year thereafter, from dusk to dawn, on the night of Sept. 11. It has become an iconic symbol that both honors those killed and celebrates the unbreakable spirit of New York. (Photo by Jackie Monmouth, Wikimedia Commons)
By Sen. Amanda Mays Bledsoe
Guest OpEd
American Airlines Flight 77 was over eastern Kentucky when hijackers likely took control on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. They turned the plane south, then east toward Washington.
At the Pentagon, Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Edward Earhart, 26, of Morehead, was working on a day he was supposed to be off. A colleague needed help, so he came in.
Earhart’s work had little in common with the images most Americans associate with war. He was an aerographer’s mate who helped Navy ships find safe routes around sea ice. An iceberg appeared on his computer screen saver. After his funeral, coworkers signed his white Navy cap and gave it to his family. The cap is now part of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum’s collection.
That cap offers a way to see past the scale of Sept. 11, which can flatten individual lives into one enormous national tragedy. Earhart did not report to the Pentagon expecting to enter history. He went because someone needed him.
Twenty-five years later, that distinction matters. I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news and found a television. At the time, I was studying international affairs at UK’s Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce. I watched as first responders rushed into danger. History was unfolding before us, rewriting what we understood about the world in the days and months that followed. The museum estimates that 100 million Americans have no lived memory of the attacks. Those who do often remember small, precise things: the room where they first heard, the television they watched or the person they called. Younger Americans have none of that. They know Sept. 11 only through what others choose to tell them.
Pearl Harbor made this passage before it, from a day that millions remembered to a history later generations received. Sept. 11 is now following that path.
Memory itself cannot be handed down. What can be passed along is an honest account that keeps the people inside it. The story belongs to Americans who were not yet born just as surely as it belongs to those who watched it unfold.
It also extends well beyond the smoke and wreckage. This year, the 9/11 Memorial’s anniversary commemoration will include a seventh moment of silence. Six mark the times when the planes struck, the towers fell and Flight 93 crashed. The seventh, observed after the reading of names, honors those who later died from 9/11-related illnesses. It has no corresponding minute on the clock. That part of the toll accumulated quietly over years.
By late 2001, the 101st Airborne Division’s 3rd Brigade had deployed from Fort Campbell to Afghanistan. Thousands of Kentucky National Guard soldiers and airmen would mobilize in the years ahead. Those deployments reached far beyond the people in uniform. Kentucky families planned around departures, endured months apart and waited for news from far away. Children grew older between homecomings. The television coverage eventually ended; the effects on those households did not.
That, too, belongs to the history later generations will inherit. The date alone cannot carry it.
We will not always be here to explain why Sept. 11 matters. The date will remain, and so will the familiar footage. The people are easy to lose, but they are the most important thing we must treasure.
“Never forget” cannot mean repeating two words every September. It means remembering the names, the lives they lived and what followed those terrorists’ attack, and carefully preserving that story.
Someday, no living American will be able to begin, “I remember where I was.” When that day comes, the record should show more than how the buildings fell. It should also preserve the signed white cap of a 26-year-old Kentuckian who went to the Pentagon because a fellow service member needed help.
Sen. Amanda Mays Bledsoe, R-Lexington, represents the 12th Senate District, which includes Boyle, Mercer, and Woodford Counties and part of Fayette County. She is vice chair of the Senate Appropriations and Revenue and Families and Children Committees. She is co-chair of the Commission on Race and Access to Opportunity.