“History tends to forget.”
When Fire Chief Jason Gilliland made this statement to the Current this week, he was referring, of course, to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the 25th anniversary of which will be observed with the traditional ceremony at Memorial Park on Friday, beginning at 10 a.m.
We were struck by the chief’s comment, too, that he now has firefighters in his department who weren’t yet born when the towers fell. Similarly, many residents were not here a quarter-century ago. They have no personal memories of how the community came together to mourn three of its neighbors along with the nearly 3,000 other victims of the attacks.
In the spirit of not forgetting, them, a reminder of who the three local victims of the 9/11 attacks were:
Dr. Frederick Rimmele, a family physician who taught medical residents at Beverly and Hunt hospitals, was flying to a medical conference in Monterey, California, when United Flight 175 was hijacked.
William Weems, a freelance television producer, was headed to Los Angeles on the same flight to oversee an Energy Star ad shoot. He left behind a wife and a 7-year-old daughter.
Erik Isbrandtsen, a Marblehead native and Babson College soccer standout, was working the equity desk at Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of the North Tower.
Marblehead also lost two service members in the war the attacks set in motion: Army Staff Sgt. Christopher N. Piper and Marine Corps 2nd Lt. Christopher B. Shay.
But the town has another connection to Sept. 11 as well. Virginia Buckingham, a longtime resident and former president of the Current’s board of directors, was running the Massachusetts Port Authority — and by extension, Logan International Airport — when both hijacked planes departed its runways.
In the weeks that followed, as the country turned toward grief, Buckingham became a target of blame. She was pushed out of her job and later named in a wrongful-death lawsuit. She has spent the 25 years since working through what it means to carry blame for the unimaginable, a journey chronicled in her memoir.
What she said about that process is worth sitting with. Buckingham describes herself as having both been “changed completely” and yet finding her way back to who she was before — reshaped and yet returned.
Buckingham picked up the same thread upon revisiting St. Paul’s Chapel near Ground Zero last year. The chapel, too, had reverted from a 9/11 waystation back to something closer to what it had been before — a place of ordinary prayer. But what had happened there had not been erased completely.
Meanwhile, the country has experienced the bizarro version of this phenomenon, it seems.
For a few weeks in the fall of 2001, Americans across every divide — political, geographic, generational — grieved together and seemed to trust each other more.
Regrettably, in the years since, the nation has snapped back into its prior state — and then some. We are fractious, suspicious of the other side and quick to assume bad faith.
But don’t miss one of the morals of Buckingham’s story. All of our experiences — positive and negative — inform and shape how we evolve. In that, perhaps there is some hope for our nation, too.
The instinct that showed up on Sept. 12 — to check on a neighbor, to set aside what divided us — wasn’t manufactured by the emergency. It was in us the whole time; the emergency just gave us permission to use it.
That spirit remains available, waiting to be summoned forth, even if we have allowed those muscles to atrophy.
A glimpse of that instinct has been on view as many Marbleheaders have continued to gather at Memorial Park every September without needing to be asked twice.
If the crowd is particularly large this year — and we hope it is — perhaps it speaks not only to our recognition of the importance of marking such a somber milestone but also to our collective yearning to summon those better instincts on a more regular basis.
We can only hope.
