Making Sense of the Senseless

Like many elected officials across America, I have been asked to speak at a local event this weekend commemorating the 10-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m willing to admit right here and now that I don’t have the first clue what to say.

I’m really struggling with this. Public speaking is a regular part of what I do as a state representative, and it’s usually not too difficult to figure out the proper topic and appropriate tone for the audience.

I try to stay away from written speeches whenever possible in the hope of sounding more like a person and less of a politician. I also do my best to remember that I’m usually not the reason people are at a certain event, so keeping it short and simple never hurts.

But talking about 9/11 is much more difficult. What is there to say that hasn’t already been said a thousand times over? There are only a couple of obvious avenues you can go down with this type of speech.

First, you can talk about the first responders and the people who lost their lives in the attacks. There are certainly no lack of anecdotes about American heroes and the families they left behind—those stories are tragic and their importance and impact cannot be understated.

But for me to stand there and tell people never to forget the fallen heroes seems unnecessary at best. Who am I to imply that anyone attending a 9/11 memorial service would be likely to forget anytime soon?

The other easy choice is to give a personal perspective and talk about where I was when the attacks took place. I was preparing to present to my Constitutional Law class on 9/11, during my second year at Duquesne University Law School.

I could talk about the chaos of being in Pittsburgh while there was real fear of unknown planes coming out of the sky, or I could talk about the surreal and unique experience of watching thousands of people flee an American city in the middle of the day. But again, I wasn’t doing anything heroic that morning; what makes my experience any more special than anyone else’s?

So what’s left to talk about? The only other possibility is to try and make sense of what happened and where we go from here, which leads us to the real challenge.

We live in a very turbulent world, and 9/11 was a shocking reminder of how quickly that turbulence can knock us all down in an instant. It seems like a decade should be enough time to give us comfort and closure, especially with the death of Osama bin Laden earlier this year, but that is simply not true.

A decade is just a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things, and the events of September 11, 2001 were on a scale so immense we cannot yet possibly understand their true meaning and ramifications.

History will detail the impact of 9/11 on our political system, our national security, our economy, our civil liberties and a myriad of other effects we haven’t considered yet.

I suppose my only option is to approach the memory of 9/11 not as a politician or someone trying to make sense of the senseless. In the absence of true understanding and historical perspective, we must be content with offering revered remembrance for the fallen and sharing personal experience of shared tragedy.

There really is no other option.

I guess I came up with something to talk about after all.