Volume CXXXII, Number 2 September 20, 2002 f

Bowdoin failed September 11
TODD BUELL
COLUMNIST

Last year after the attacks of September 11, our school came together in a solemn, mournful, and supportive way that I will never forget. One of my proudest moments as a Bowdoin student was watching us place all of our temporal concerns aside and help those in our community who had experienced unimaginable personal grief on that day.

Conversely, I was disappointed in the dearth of ceremony and solemnity on the one-year anniversary. I understand that the day held deeply divergent and personal meaning to many students. Some wanted private solitude and contemplation, while others generally wanted it to be another day.

Yet an ambivalent student population does not preclude a reflective ceremony. That is what New York City and other municipalities did across the country. Nowhere were people required to stay home from work, but nearly everywhere there were meaningful reminders of the events of a year ago.

I realized that we needed a formal ceremony on September 11, 2002, when I woke up early that morning and was walking across the quad. I remember every minute detail of my day on September 11, 2001, and I remember strolling across the quad on that day as well. Both September 11 last year and this year were lovely late-summer mornings.

I empathized with some New Yorkers who intimated in a recent New York Times issue that the similarity in the weather between this year and last year made remembering September 11 more painful. Despite the temptation, our memories would not allow us to experience a beautiful day in the same way.
Just as I will never forget September 11, I will never forget the emptiness that I felt a year later on Bowdoin's quad. I thought of how moving it would have been if we had been able to come together as a community the way we did in the days after the attacks last year.

Unfortunately, we turned September 11 into another day in the calendar. There seemed to be little-if any-formal recognition that multiple Bowdoin alumni died on that day along with friends and family members of current Bowdoin students.

Some people make the argument that those students who did feel a particularly deep sense of personal loss on September 11 had the option to not attend class or engage in a private exercise of remembrance by perhaps attending one of the many local church services commemorating the occasion.

This logic, however, fails to grasp the severity of the attack. It treats the attacks of September 11 as a professor would treat a student's death in the family: an excuse for class absence, but not a reason to halt the course.
Though the attacks hit some members of the Bowdoin community harder than others, it hit us all with a level of shock and intensity that requires pause and reflection. We all know where we were when the attacks hit, and our lives will forever be changed by the images of the towers falling. Rarely in history has the entire face and psyche of a nation changed in less than two hours. In that time period, we were forced out of the "Bowdoin Bubble" and were confronted with the fragile reality that is our world.

Our failure to recognize September 11 this year with the same solemnity, gravity, and respect as most of the country did disregards the connection with the outside world that we forged last year. Our lack of recognition served as an unfortunate validation of the "Bowdoin bubble."

It would have been appropriate for us to do what President Mills suggested it was not necessary for us to do-to "relive the painful events of that day." We should have done what the scholar Victor Davis Hanson suggested in the most recent issue of National Review: "stop all public activities and observe an official period of silence, the first of a yearly institutionalized hour of remembrance."

There would have been nothing inappropriate if the college had decided to cancel classes and activities in the morning of September 11. A memorial service on the quad, if there were no other conflicts, would have been a powerful and meaningful way for our campus to reunite, grieve, and reflect as it did after the attacks.

For many on this campus, September 11, 2002, was a day of indescribable personal pain. For all of us it was a day of difficult but necessary remembrance. Our school should have helped us in our journey to remember and heal in the same ways that it did last year in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Unfortunately, Bowdoin failed the solemn legacy that is September 11.