Remembering remembering September 11

The front page of every news site I look at today makes prominent mention of the anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I find myself asking, for the first time I can remember, whether remembering the attacks should be a yearly observation.

I try to remember a comparable event. Only John F. Kennedy's assassination comes to mind. Perhaps someone who knows can inform me: were there memorial observations a year later, on November 22, 1964? Ten years later, in 1973? In 1974?

My intent here is not to diminish JFK's death (if it turns out that we did not observe it so consistently afterwards) or suggest that we should lay off the 9/11 memorializing. I just mean to say that the way we have continued to mark the date, especially without it actually having been made an official holiday*, strikes me as unusual.

Last year I set down my memories of the day of the attacks. Today I went back and re-read them, to remind myself. These things do slip away if we don't mark them. As I get old enough to notice myself forget things that happened to me, I realize that memories are not self-sustaining. We mark what we choose to remember.

I remember that in 2002 I was already disappointed in how quickly we had lost what good had come of the attacks: a sense of unity and purpose, a shared conviction that America was worth protecting, imperfect though it was. People had sworn that "everything had changed" and then, largely, gone back to the way things had been before. Not everything changed, but some things did, and as might be expected of murder, the deepest changes have mostly been for the worse; but eleven years on I think that, when we said we would "never forget," we might actually have meant it.

* Correction: apparently it is. I confess that I had not known. Apparently "Patriot Day" was created on December 18, 2001.

Clayton astutely pointed out that Pearl Harbor Day (December 7) is the closest analog we have. By contrast, though, it was designated in 1994, almost 53 years after the attacks.

So, to be honest, I'm disappointed that September 11 was immediately made an official holiday. If it were not, I would suggest that it be made one now, and it would perhaps mean more. I would prefer a name that didn't taste so strongly of euphemism, as well. But perhaps it says something better about us that the events are remembered, while the empty words disappear. There are quite few mentions of "Patriot Day" today.