Flight 93 Memorial

Last month, I visited the national memorial at the site where Flight 93, intended to fly into the US Capitol Building, crashed. There’s nothing to see, really, except for what has been built there. You have to know what you’re looking for to see any sign of the actual crash.

Most of the visitors have young children with them. I guess this is the sort of place, like a library or museum, that adults think their children should go to but that they wouldn’t go to themselves. I wonder what they’ve told them, what kind of context they’ve provided, because as I said there really isn’t much to see.

How do you explain evil to a 5-year-old? I suppose the initial explanation isn’t so hard to imagine: “Some mean people were angry at America, and they wanted to hurt us. They took over an airplane and were going to crash it into Washington DC, but the passengers on the plane stopped them and made them crash it here instead. They died but they saved a lot of other people in Washington.”

But then there are the follow-up questions, the questions we’re still asking ourselves: “Why? Will it happen again? Am I safe? What about the people I love?”

There’s a bulletin board where visitors can post short notes and messages, their reflections on the memorial. All were grave in tone, and most had at least some political overtones. To many, the passengers on Flight 93 were heroes who represented what’s best about America. Two messages explained that their writers were inspired by those passengers to enlist in the armed services.

One note asked, “Where did you really die? Where the government says, or in the woods 400 yards away? One day the truth will be known.” I don’t know enough about the 9/11 conspiracy theories to get that reference.

One poster suggested that pictures of the hijackers should be displayed so that we would know what the enemy looks like. His message had the effect of making me realize for the first time that there was scant mention of four of the people who’d died at this place on September 11, 2001. Nothing surprising about that, really, but I suppose this is their final resting place as well, and probably someone somewhere is sad about that.

The message that really caught my eye, though, made me chuckle at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it, and it soon became my favorite. Amid all the somber and self-important musings was scrawled in big, childish letters: “I’m sorry you died.”