"Where were you when"

http://www.sflistteamhouse.com/Misc/Pearl%20Harbor/original.htm

It occurred to me yesterday during our class discussion of 9/11 how many similarities exist between the way we publicly remember and memorialize September 11 and the attack on Pearl Harbor, and how this similarity might account for many people's reactions on that day eleven years ago.

That day is a little hazy for me now, and it's hard to separate what I experienced from what I was told or learned later. Maybe the situation is complicated for me because I never witnessed the events live, either in person or on TV. I was told what happened by a teacher hours after the attacks occurred, and by then an official narrative was already developing.

I'm pretty sure I heard comparisons to Pearl Harbor start popping up almost immediately, though. As the death toll started coming in, people noted that it was more people than had died at Pearl Harbor. The attack surprised us and seemed initially incomprehensible. I think of the line from the movie Pearl Harbor when the first bombs are falling and someone says, "I didn't even know the Japs were sore at us!" The terrorists flew planes, like the Japanese bombers in Hawaii, and they were quickly identified with a racial other.

I'm also pretty sure that at some point someone said to me that now my generation had a "where were you when" moment. For my parents it was Kennedy's assassination, for my grandparents it was Pearl Harbor. I don't remember being especially surprised when we went to war less than a month later, although I did have a clear sense that it was a historic event and now things would be different. I wrote in my journal that World War 3 had started, making a connection between the War on Terror and America's war against Hitler. I had no doubt that we were doing right.

Carlson's contribution to the forum on 9/11 asserts that we use genre to construct a narrative around seemingly chaotic and meaningless violence, and I agree that the genre Americans most often reach for is melodrama. But I would argue that there is a more specific paradigm that was applied to 9/11, less a genre than a modern myth. The myth says that every generation has its defining moment, a tragedy that results in a loss of innocence and a renewed sense of national purpose and identity. Maybe this myth was originally spawned by Pearl Harbor, World War 2, and the Greatest Generation. The circumstances of 9/11 invited comparison to Pearl Harbor, and so we patterned our response accordingly.

In his post on the course blog, Kelly talked about the lack of empathy he felt as he watched the towers fall on TV. Looking back, I don't think my own response was based on empathy or sympathy with the victims as much as a feeling that my life had changed and I was now living in a world less safe and more important. History was happening all around me! America would awaken and take up a role as defender of justice once more! I must do my part! It was a sobering and ennobling feeling, and I think a lot of people felt it along with me. We have to hang on to that perception of the events of 9/11 and the war that followed, because we want to hang on to that feeling. We want 9/11 to have been Pearl Harbor so that it will mean something.

http://dailybail.com/home/new-aerial-photos-of-911-world-trade-center-collapse.html