"I Want My Mommy!"

by Elinor Hoefs

It is well-known that nothing much of importance happened in the world before the first airing of the Ed Sullivan Show on June 20,1948.

The few events of interest before that date can be generally handled by a one-hour National Geographic Special or, in the case of major stories such as the history of baseball, by a Ken Burns mini-series. Those efforts, plus the occasional biopic when an unusually good script comes along (Shakespeare in Love, Gladiator, Titanic), pretty well take care of the human past.

This shortsightedness, which is in fact blindness, explains why current culture sees lightweight persons such as Tom Brokaw and Stephen Ambrose as "guardians" of "history." "History," you understand, in this context means approximately the glory that was Guadalcanal, the grandeur that was Patton.

In this shallow misunderstanding of the past, suffering, maiming, and death are qualities of history which not only happen offstage, they are so distant from the onstage "heroism," so far from the reality of present-day celebrity, that they hardly exist at all.

The suffering and death in the past is of interest only as messy afterbirth which gave the world "great" personalities of the kind worthy of attention by modern media and, thus, modern thinkers as well.

Which leads us to the headline on the first page of the Arts and Leisure section of The New York Times, December 29, 2001:

2001’s Lessons: We Must Go On; We Can Go On.

Truly, a headline whose petty self-centeredness and whose extraordinary ignoring of history are breath-taking, embarrassing, and, probably, in the long run, very dangerous.

Yes, the 3,000 deaths of September 11 were shocking, tragic. All who watched were to some degree traumatized, changed.

And yes, the particular form of insanity called "terrorism" now loose in the world is frightening and requires decisive action, both short-term and long-term.

But our grandstanding reaction to September 11 has generally been that of a spoiled, over-protected, rich kid who finally escaped his governess, climbed a tree, fell, and broke an arm.

This is NOT to trivialize those who died on September 11, and especially not those who died trying to prevent more deaths: the firefighters and others who kept going UP the stairs in the World Trade Center, the persons who refused to let Flight 93 become another terrorist missile.

This is rather to serve as a reminder that the suffering which humanity inflicted on itself on September 11 is almost minuscule when viewed open-eyed in the light of history, in the light of the suffering which history shows us we are capable of experiencing in this world.

Our grief over 3,000 violent, unnecessary deaths is real and valid and important. But if we forget the far, far greater grief of the past, what then? What then?

So.

The Key to the Chart: