Visiting the 9/11 Museum

Writing my post on September 11 the other day, How I have responded to September 11: Service, prompted me to look up the 9/11 Museum. I’ve walked past the two pools/fountains and looked into them since they’re not far from my home and sometimes life brings me past them, but I haven’t visited the museum.

The site said it was free for NYPD and figured my auxiliary badge would qualify. I understood that the whole area was closed to everyone but families and politicians on 9/11 itself, but I also figured it would be crowded the next day.

That day was a Saturday so I had time and went. I hadn’t planned ahead or thought of what to expect.

Indeed, showing my badge got me past the long lines and inside for free. It happened so fast and so easily that I still didn’t think much about it. It’s all underground. It was fairly crowded.

At the bottom of the first staircase down was this simple sign simply stating what happened. Down the hall were recorded voices playing, saying people’s memories of the day, and illuminated signs with their words appearing.

My tears just started flowing. I kept walking. It was dark and I wasn’t noticeably convulsing, or however you describe the motions a body makes when crying a lot, so I just walked, keeping to myself. I don’t know what I was crying about. There are plenty of reasons I could have, but I’m not sure which ones applied.

The museum split into two parts: the historical part, which was in its own space designed for you to walk through roughly how things transpired the morning of 9/11 through to soon after, and the part outside that room, which showed related artifacts and donated objects, like this fire truck. There were lots of giant steel beams or other construction objects whose distortion revealed the incredible forces.

Many people wore FDNY shirts. At first I thought they were all with the fire department or family of, but there were so many and many acted like tourists visiting from elsewhere, I think they also just wore commemorative shirts. People were mostly subdued. There were many non-Americans and clear non-New Yorkers. I wondered how their experiences differed from mine. I felt even more curious about those under 25 or even 30 years. What was the museum like for them? Was it like Kennedy’s assassination or the Vietnam War to me?

Before entering the historical part, my tears came and went, sometimes responding to something I saw, other times for no reason. I didn’t see many new things.

The historical part got me near bawling. I didn’t call attention to myself. I wasn’t looking for hugs. Again, I felt intense emotion, but not specific. I wasn’t mourning the loss of anything in particular. I just felt intense emotion. I saw almost no one else crying.

The historical part was an overload of artifacts, images, and video of the couple days leading to and following the attacks. They played recordings of people in Flight 93, TV reporters innocently announcing a breaking news story unaware of its magnitude, images and video of people jumping, some of everything from the day. It wasn’t like reliving it but close to it.

I tried to think of ways to make sense of what happened, what to do about it as an individual 25 years later, what potentially we as a city, nation, and species might do about it, what to think about it, how to decrease the chances of something like it from happening again.

No answers arose.

I don’t know what to make of what happened. I have lots of thoughts about how dependence on fossil fuels contributes to imperialism and power flowing to people who control access to them. I think that thinking along those lines is required to change the parts of global culture contributing to people practicing terrorism, but prevention is different than remembering.

I don’t know how to prevent something like it from happening again.

I can see why people want to blame, but outside the people who planned and perpetrated it, it’s not clear whom to blame or hold blameless.

I tried to think if I were asked how to organize a museum or what to include to commemorate the event, but couldn’t think of what I would do.

I recommend visiting but not sure what to make of the museum or my experience. Certainly I felt intense, powerful emotion, but it didn’t feel cathartic or like it solved anything. Still, something felt right, given the lack of sense to the event.