Remembering 9/11 and the Lessons of Antietam, 2022
As I have explained in years past, the events of 9/17/1862 and 9/11/2001 remain inextricably linked for me. Both involved tremendous loss of life, and both left catastrophic scars on the American psyche. Both left us vowing to “Never Forget!” Memory is a funny thing, of course—what we choose to remember, and how we choose to remember it, and what we choose to forget (deliberately, as individuals and as a society).
In recognition of the battle of Antietam and the events of 9/11—and as a continuing cautionary tale against forgetting either of them—I offer my customary repost of a reflection I put up during ECW’s first year, Remembering 9/11 and the Lesson of Antietam.
Some very good points regarding the scope of loss of those disasters and the consequent awakening to the reality and horror of what happened, enabled by the modern technologies of both times. But to conflate 9/11, an external attack from a small group of terrorists who intended to die to accomplish their goals, with the events of Antietam, where two armies, in full knowledge that some lives would be lost, fought to what each hoped would be a war-ending conclusion but which tragically was not, is not valid. I fully concur with the devastating impact of each of these events, but they were not cut from the same cloth.