Wir betreten feuertrunken

I was at the top of of the Twin Towers exactly one month before 9/11. I was told that elevator was the safest place to be in the event of an earthquake. The morning I came downstairs to hear the news of the attack was the morning I really understood what it was to be mortal. What happened on September 11th 2001 was a tragedy. But it was not an unwarranted attack, and it was not justification for a war.

I do not oppose history textbooks and schools teaching about 9/11, in the same way that it would be silly to oppose the teaching of things like Pearl Harbor or Jim Crow. This country is built on the lessons learned from disaster.

That being said, it would be prudent for me to point out that history is relative, subjective, and easily modified. There is nothing we can do about this either, it is human nature. Memory is faulty, our brains remember things with our own bias applied to them. And so in history books, not only in America but all around the world, "history" is slightly different.

There are examples of this everywhere, going as far back as history can possibly go with stories from the Bible or the Gilgamesh Epic. It is widely accepted that these could have at one point been true stories, and thus history. The Deluge Myth is mentioned in both of these works, as well as in other stories from other cultures, and illustrates how quickly history can become myth, or myth can become history. Before anything was ever written down, people relied upon oral tradition to share the stories of their past. It was hundreds of years before these stories could be written down and in that time hundreds of voices had told those stories, and hundreds of modifications had been made to them.

This still happens today, even with video and media technology stories are still slightly altered and skewed each time they are told. The teller bends them to fit their needs, or their own idea. As Meridith Rode stated in "The Hunt for Democracy: The Lion's Perspective," " Works from other times, cultures, and traditions have often been force-fit into the Western idea of art, and this sometimes has distorted or deformed the work itself" (28).

To wrap up my point, and actually tie in the reading:
"So, yes, history can be trivial and history can be really important, depending on what you do with it and depending on what you learn" (Zinn, 71).

THE END