What are we remembering in heartfelt 9/11 services?

CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
The Globe And Mail

September 12, 2009

OTTAWA - cblatchford@globeandmail.com

Yesterday at Beechwood Cemetery - one of only two places that I know of in the country where 9/11 is memorialized in a formal way - the ceremony was small, even intimate, despite the presence of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the security and protocol entourage that is necessarily around him.

There were relatives from a few 9/11 Canadian families (among them Maureen Basnicki, whose husband, Ken, died in the Twin Towers, and her two grown children; Cindy Barkway, whose husband, David, was also at the World Trade Center, and her two gorgeous little boys) and a handful from the fallen 129 Canadian soldiers who have perished in Afghanistan and were also being remembered. (Among these relatives were Jim Davis, whose son Paul was killed in a 2006 vehicle accident; the beautiful pistol of a young woman Mishelle Brown, whose hubby, Warrant Officer Dennis Brown, died in March of this year in a bomb blast; and the mom of Sergeant Shawn Eades, killed in another bomb blast Aug. 20 of last year).

The program was low-key (sufficiently so, God help us all, that I was the MC), teary, and ended on a tender note, with the children of the dead releasing butterflies into the air. If it was quite lovely, held in the magnificent cemetery that is now Canada's National Military Cemetery, the classic Canadian understatement with which it was all done was a little jarring.

That Beechwood and the other 9/11 memorial I know of - and I learned about the park located within Happy Rolph Park in St. Catharines, Ont., where a tree is planted for every Canadian 9/11 victim, only yesterday, from Hans Gerhardt, whose son Ralph died at the World Trade Center - are both private projects is startling to me.

Beechwood is project of the cemetery foundation, the one in St. Catharines headed by a private citizen named Rudy Behring and financed by public donations. I have great regard for both efforts, think it's marvellous that both proceeded independent of government, and what I have to say next isn't meant in any way to denigrate the existing memorials.

But the attacks of Sept. 11 weren't an attack upon private citizens, although thousands of them died that day; they were assaults upon the great ideals of all Western democracies, if particularly the United States - upon liberty, equality, opportunity.

Jetliners weren't directed toward the World Trade Center and the Pentagon because of all the vulnerable people within - although the sheer numbers of them were a nice bonus for the hijackers - but because the buildings in which they worked or were visiting were to the terrorists symbols of what they hated. And as Mr. Harper said yesterday in a stirring and sombre speech, "9/11 was a day of hate."

Remembering the day - the sheer scale of it, the scope of the death, destruction and hate, not to mention the tepidity of then-prime-minister Jean Chrétien's public remarks - seems to have been lost in the collective memory only eight years on.

Certainly, officially, by the first anniversary, Mr. Chrétien, in a CBC interview taped in the summer of 2002 and saved for that day, already was beginning to shift the blame for the attacks to the Americans themselves.

He'd been in Manhattan shortly before 9/11, he told Peter Mansbridge in the interview, and heard complaints from Wall Street "capitalists" about Canada's economic ties to Cuba.

"I told them," he said, "when you are powerful like you are, you guys, it's the time to be nice. And it is one of the problems - you cannot exercise your powers to the point of humiliation of the others. And that is what the Western world - not only the Americans but the Western world - has to realize."

That view, often applauded in our country, has only gained a stronger foothold in the intervening years. What would be entirely unacceptable to do in Canadian civil society to any other group of people - argue, for instance, that rape victims invite assault by the manner of their dress or conduct - effectively has been done to a whole country and its people. Yet America, for all its well-documented faults, did nothing to warrant raining death upon its civilian populace.

Any 9/11 anniversary is only partly about remembering the victims, among them 24 Canadians and two spouses of Canadians. The naming of these dead, and the 129 soldiers who have died in Afghanistan, was done yesterday at Beechwood by the children and spouses of some of them.

This link to me is both real and natural: The 9/11 hijackers trained and honed their craft in Afghanistan; many of those who died at the World Trade Center were police and firefighters, who shared with their brothers and sisters in arms the belief that the weak must be protected, and were on their way to do just that, charging into burning buildings that others were trying to flee when the towers collapsed; the 129 Canadian soldiers, who by their voluntary service in Afghanistan chose to defend the great democratic ideals, died there.

Most of us know very well where we were when the news first broke eight years ago. I was getting ready for work, with CNN on the tube, when I heard about a plane hitting one of the towers. By the time I walked to the TV set, sure enough a plane was doing just that; I thought it was a replay, but it was a live shot of the second tower being struck.

It behooves us, as citizens and as a country, to remember much more than that.

March 10, 2010