The Artifice of Anniversaries

Ten years ago today, I spent a 14-hour day as an editor in the Cincinnati Enquirer's newsroom.

The day started out doing my civic duty - voting. Many people, in fact, have forgotten that Sept. 11, 2001, was also a day to vote on (mainly) municipal issues across the country.
The day ended also doing my civic duty - informing the public at length about the horrors of terrorism on our own soil.

In-between, I insisted that my husband leave work, pick up our two young children who were in school near Cincinnati's downtown, and take them home to protect them should more deadly planes come calling on tall buildings in America's heartland.

Spencer Platt, photojournalist

The special edition we at the Enquirer published on 9/11 featured on its cover a photo by my former Elmira, N.Y. Star-Gazette colleague, Spencer Platt, at right, who has gone on to be an international photojournalist extraordinaire.
Read his account in Life magazine of how he did his civic duty that day - leaping out of bed in NYC and racing into the unknown with a lens pointed skyward.

Most of 9/11 and the days that followed I spent coordinating with two Cincinnati Enquirer journalists - Robert Anglen and Karen Samples Gutierrez - who just happened to be vacationing separately in NYC.  They left their loved ones to jump into the reporting fray - Robert by talking his way into the Ground Zero area and Karen by befriending a group of rescuers at their home base on the water.

To call this civic duty would be the understatement of an industry - it was sheer journalistic heroism, and I am still humbled by their work.

Today, for hours I read 10-year anniversary accounts of 9/11. How could you NOT want to acknowledge, on the 10th anniversary, how this terrorist attack changed America's history, its people, the things we fear the most?

And yet.
There is something to be said for setting aside anniversaries.
Instead of wallowing in memories of pain and heroism, danger and loss, why not live each day building on what you have learned from an event - and concentrating on the here and now?

We went hiking in the woods today, too, this 10th anniversary of 9/11. I gardened, cleaned a bathroom, talked with my 16-year-old son about football, wrote, made turkey burritos for dinner. And it felt good, even noteworthy for its ordinariness. An American ordinariness.

The 9/11 reporting the Cincinnati Enquirer did was extraordinary, and I would not take back those days. Many, many other stories we did that year were also noteworthy in their civic significance - particularly our investigative and social service work after race riots, which I was integrally involved in.

But embattled American journalism is a civic trust, meant to serve citizens every day as a watchdog, as a reliable source of information, as storytellers, as empower-ers so people can take action.
Anniversaries come and go.
Civic responsibility does not.