Although I was not able to physically go and see the memorial museum, I found the online audio of the tour to be very interesting. That being said, I struggled to keep up with what was being said as I could not physically see what the tour guide was referring too. Because it was often hard to follow what was being referenced, I felt that through this medium it took away the extreme emotional reactions I would have had had I been there in person. This got me to thinking about how I perceive horrible events like 9/11, and the impact that sight has over our other senses in context of memory. Although I could hear what the audio was explaining, I felt detached from the experience, and therefore I struggled to deeply connect with what was happening. However, had I been standing there seeing the pictures and witnessing the sources the museum had, I can only imagine how overwhelmed with emotion I would have been. Is there a difference in the way we not only experience emotion through which sense we are using to understand it, but also does having other people with you influence how your emotions respond? I can imagine that had I been standing in a room full of people listening to someone explain all of the exhibits, hearing the sighs of people next to me and seeing their body language would have brought on even more emotions towards the event, in comparison to if i had been there alone. This thought kept coming back to me during the duration of the audio, and it clearly tied together the concept of “collective memory” and how a society and community of people create a memory that they share with one another.
Bringing my own personal views into this, a question that kept coming to my mind during this assignment was why are we so caught up on one event? Why are humans so focused on the what and not the why? Every event like this is awful, but why are we so content on remembering one event instead of changing our behaviour to not let it happen again?! I fully support memorialising the innocent people who lost their lives, but I feel like we have fallen into this culture that once an event occurs, we make a monument or a memorial and then we move on from it like nothing happened. And the events that are memorialised are only the ones with some sort of political agenda. All over the world every day people are suffering through genocides and civil wars, yet we are so caught up in certain historical pasts that we don’t seem to see the bigger picture: we need to stop hurting each other! We need to stop using these memorials and horrible incidents for political propaganda and focus on the fact that innocent lives are being lost for extremely poor reasons. I am not saying that memorials are bad, I fully support them and love that people want to honour the lives of those who died. However I am tired of these public memorials only being created when it fits into the political realm. We need to stop repeating history!!!!!!!!