Beyond Remembrance: What 9/11 Teaches Us About Conflict, Responsibility and Choice

Every year when September 11 comes around, we remember.

We remember where we were when we heard. We remember the images of the planes, the towers, the people running through streets covered in ash. We remember the people who went to work that morning and never came home, the first responders who ran toward something everyone else was trying to escape, and the families whose lives divided permanently into before and after.

There is something important about remembering. And I believe remembrance asks more of us than simply looking back at what happened.

Twenty-five years have passed. We have the distance of time, more information than we had that morning, and the ability to see September 11 not only as an isolated act of unimaginable violence, but as one moment within a much longer human story.

What becomes possible when, without diminishing the horror of what happened or the innocence of those who suffered, we become curious about the conditions that preceded it?

One of the most meaningful ways we can honour history is not only to remember what happened, but to be willing to understand how human beings arrive at such places in the first place.

You can condemn September 11 unequivocally while still asking what existed before September 11.

What grievances had accumulated? What violence had already occurred elsewhere? What consequences had American foreign policy produced that were largely invisible to ordinary Americans? What had been done in the name of security, strategic interests, oil, alliances and containment? What histories connected the United States with Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan, stretching back through the Cold War? And how had those actions been experienced by people living on the other side of them?

None of those questions excuses terrorism. Understanding causation doesn't assign moral permission.

There is something incomplete about remembrance when we begin the story on the day we were wounded. When September 11 becomes the starting point, everything that preceded it can disappear from view—not because what came before justifies what happened, but because no event of this magnitude emerges without a history.

September 11 becomes not merely a story about what nineteen men did one morning on behalf of a terrorist organization. It becomes part of a story about relationships between nations accumulating history over decades. One action creates a new condition. That condition changes someone's perception. Their response creates another consequence. Someone retaliates. Someone else experiences that retaliation as an unprovoked beginning because they don't remember—or never knew—the previous chapter.

Eventually everybody knows exactly what the other side did to them and remarkably little about what their own side did to the other. Each side carries a detailed memory of its own wounds while often holding only a partial understanding of the wounds it has caused. Each can come to experience its own actions as justified responses to what came before, while experiencing the other's response as yet another act of aggression.

Somewhere along the way, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify where the conflict actually began—and increasingly easy to believe that they are the problem.

When we step back from geopolitics, we can recognize something profoundly ordinary.

We do this too.

As above, so below. As within, so without. The micro is reflected in the macro, and the macro in the micro.

The scale may be radically different, but the underlying human pattern of action, reaction, grievance and consequence is similar.

We see it in marriages, families, friendships, communities and workplaces.

You said this.

Yes, because you did that.

I did that because three months earlier you…

Eventually there's an entire private history underneath an argument about dishes.

That doesn't mean everyone involved in a conflict is equally responsible for what occurs. Sometimes one person really does behave terribly. Sometimes there is abuse, exploitation or a profound imbalance of power, and suggesting that each person simply needs to examine their contribution can obscure where responsibility actually belongs.

Interdependence of events does not imply equivalence of responsibility.

But in ordinary human conflict, there is enormous wisdom in becoming interested in the pattern that has developed between us rather than focusing only on identifying who is right and who is wrong. What are we each doing, interpreting, reacting to and reinforcing that keeps bringing us back to the same place?

What happens when I do this?

What happens in you?

What does your reaction activate in me?

What do I then do in response?

And at what point does somebody interrupt the loop?

That's where September 11 offers something deeper than either patriotic remembrance or conspiratorial suspicion.

The question doesn't have to be only:

“Whose fault was this?”

We can also ask:

What conditions had been created by the time we arrived here?

And then the much harder question:

What did we create next?

September 11 itself cannot be changed. But America's—and the world's—response was not predetermined. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the broader War on Terror, detention, torture, expanded surveillance, drone warfare and two decades of military intervention became another layer of cause and consequence. Some responses addressed genuine threats; others produced new suffering and resentment. Those consequences became somebody else's history—and eventually part of ours.

That's the part of remembrance that restores a sense of agency without pretending the victims had any responsibility for what happened to them.

Instead of only:

Remember what they did to us.

Or its mirror image:

Remember what we did to them.

There is a more difficult form of remembrance:

Remember what human beings can create when fear, grievance, humiliation, righteousness and retaliation become self-reinforcing.

Remember how easy it is to see our response as justified while experiencing the other person's response as aggression.

Remember that consequences travel farther than our intentions.

Remember that somewhere inside a cycle, somebody has to become conscious enough to stop feeding it.

That applies at the scale of nations.

But it is more useful—and certainly more applicable to our daily lives—at the kitchen table.

Because none of us controls American foreign policy or al-Qaeda. We do participate every day in smaller patterns of action and reaction. We can notice when we're keeping score. We can become curious about what preceded someone's behaviour without surrendering our boundaries around the behaviour itself. We can acknowledge the consequences of our actions without collapsing into blame. We can recognize another person's humanity without agreeing with them.

And most importantly, we can begin to notice the moment when we have a choice about what happens next.

When someone hurts us, disappoints us, misunderstands us, or behaves in a way we believe is wrong, there is often a space—sometimes an incredibly small one—between what happened and what we do with it.

Do we retaliate? Withdraw? Make them wrong? Gather evidence for the story we've already constructed about them? Or can we become curious about the larger pattern we're participating in?

Not:

What did I do to deserve this?

But rather:

What is happening between us? What am I contributing to this dynamic? What belongs to me here, and what doesn't? What happens if I respond differently this time?

That isn't passivity, and it isn't an invitation to tolerate harm. Sometimes the conscious response is a firmer boundary, a difficult conversation, or walking away entirely. But there is a difference between a boundary chosen from clarity and a reaction driven by the need to punish, prove or win.

We may not be able to control what another person does, but we can become more conscious of what we send back into the relationship. Sometimes that is the only place a cycle has any possibility of changing.

That's a more demanding meaning of lest we forget.

Don't forget how things come to happen.

Don't forget the histories that precede the moments we call beginnings. The patterns of action and reaction that accumulate between people, communities and nations. The ways our choices can have consequences we never intended and may never personally witness.

Remembrance asks something of us beyond looking backward. It asks us to become more conscious of the patterns we're participating in now—to recognize where we have agency, where we have responsibility, and where we can choose differently.

We cannot change what happened, but

We are always participating in what happens next.