A few days after Sept. 11, 2001, I was watching, from my apartment in New York City, as Major League Baseball resumed. A lifelong New York Mets fan, I was touched to see teams around the country honoring N.Y. and D.C. after the terrorist attacks. Rivalries that, in ordinary times, brought out the worst in all fan bases suddenly disappeared. Somewhere in the crowd of the game I was watching, a Phillies fan held up a handwritten sign: “We Are All New Yorkers Now.”
I have thought about that sign, on and off, for 25 years. This year, like every year past, the country pauses, however briefly, to remember.
I was in New York that fateful morning. I wasn’t a first responder, I didn’t lose anyone, I ran out of a building instead of into one. But I was there, in Manhattan, moving with everyone else through streets that had gone the color of ash, past people who were covered in soot and silence. That morning is still one of the clearest and also one of the least trustworthy memories I own. I have spent years teaching history, and one of the strange lessons 9/11 taught me is how much even a vivid, firsthand memory can shift with time. History and memory are not the same thing. Memory is what we carry. It evolves. History is a study of the past based on evidence and research.
But a memory I have never had to check is the feeling that baseball sign represented. For a short time in the fall of 2001, the loudest, most tribal rivalries in the country went quiet. Strangers gave blood. Neighbors who had never spoken checked on one another. My hometown, a city famous for its impatience, stood in line, patiently, to help. And a Phillies fan, of all people, decided that geography and team loyalty mattered less than the fact that we were all, suddenly, the same kind of scared and the same kind of resolved American.
Every fall, when I teach the history of that day, I bring in individual stories of the lives lost in Lower Manhattan, the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania. My classes don’t discuss timelines or conspiracies. I do not need my students to picture Ground Zero, an abhorrent term for any New Yorker. Rather, I hope they reflect on human beings, and understand that a nation’s grief was made up of thousands of individual mornings like mine, all interrupted at once. I have learned, watching a room full of students encounter this history for the first time, that they are not short on empathy. On the contrary. What they are short on is a living memory of what American unity actually felt like.
That is the part of the anniversary I find myself dwelling on this year. We are, by most measures, a more fractured country than we were on Sept. 11, 2001. It would be easy, and a little too comfortable, to treat “We Are All New Yorkers Now” as a nostalgic artifact. As a thing that happened once, briefly, under extraordinary circumstances that no longer apply.
I don’t think that’s the right lesson, and I don’t think it’s the historian’s lesson, either. History is about empathy for the humanity of the past. I will spend this anniversary the way I spend most of them — telling students what I remember, and being honest about what I’m no longer sure I remember correctly. But I will also be thinking about that baseball sign, and about whether we’re willing, 25 years on, to mean it.
Julie Johnson
Valencia
