After a well needed Christmas break, we started off our first week of ASTU by reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The novel follows a nine-year old boy named Oskar, and his struggle to make sense of his father’s death in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. I saw the movie when it came out a few years ago, and ever since then the book has been on my “to read” list so I was glad that I could finally get the chance to! Although I knew the basic plotline of the book, I enjoyed reading all the details and other important parts that were left out of the movie.
Last week before we finished the novel, we discussed the events of September 11th and our individual experiences of being taught the history and pre history of 9/11 in school. Every year on the anniversary of 9/11 we would have a special chapel to commemorate the alumni who perished in the attacks. Other than the basic facts, I realized I wasn’t formally taught the history leading up to 9/11, the details of the event, or its military aftermath.
A couple days ago, I stumbled upon this image on the Internet. It’s a clip from the documentary Bowling For Columbine that briefly overviews events leading up to 9/11. I don’t know how accurate it is, but either way it certainly brings to light a different perspective of the history of 9/11. From my experience, whenever the topic of 9/11 was discussed, the focus was always on the horrendous nature of the event and its aftermath. Many people didn’t often talk about the long build up of issues that brought us to 9/11. I think there are several reasons why this happens, one being the assumption that everyone already knows about 9/11. Since our generation and those before lived through the actual events, it’s assumed that we know all there is to know about it.
I think that 9/11 should be taught and incorporated into the school curriculum so people understand the broader conflict and the overall history that encompasses the events. This is especially important now when younger generations that weren’t around/were to young to understand, are now older and mature enough to be taught about the events of September 11th. I’d want to connect this to something Dr. Luger spoke about in class, Judith Butler’s article, Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect and specifically her idea of “changing the way that we understand what happened in the first place”. I’m not going to do that though because I haven’t actually read the article, but maybe it’ll be on a future blog post.