My reaction to Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation” documentary and book was typical of my approach whenever I read biographies.  I stand in awe of these individuals, even when they are young, at their accomplishments, their energy, commitment, drive and talents.

It is not too hard to contemplate the next step, leaping from admiration to introspective evaluation on my own life, or in Tom Brokaw’s case, our own generation.  What after all have we in the Baby Boom generation accomplished?  What kind of world are we turning over to our children?  Quickly, I reach the conclusion that we pale by comparison, that the Greatest Generation handed us on a silver platter a society that we have messed up.  A collective selfishness gave way to self-indulgence, not hardship and effort, and leaves our children with challenges we did not endure, like monumental national and personal debt and the prospect of insoluble entitlement programs for the ill and elderly which they may not be able to benefit from.  We’ll make sure we get ours, thanks to their contributions and those of our parents.  We are handing over the dominant nation we inherited to the next generation as a nation in decline, unable to compete against rising powers in Asia or Latin America.   We lost our wars, in Vietnam, and the ones on poverty and in drugs.

Depressing?  That is, until I saw the “Madmen” episode of Don and Betty Draper littering on their family picnic.  It is a scene which everyone who watches the show remembers, cringed from.  Advertising executive Don stands up at the end of the picnic, crunches his beer can and tosses it into the woods.  His wife Betty hustles the children into the car and then shakes the picnic blanket full of dirty napkins and empty potato chip bags on to the lawn and leaves.  Viewers cringed, repulsed, disbelieving that people actually could commit such an unspeakable act.

Then again, much of “Madmen” is, while hopefully exaggerated for dramatic effect, reenacting a bygone time, when people smoked in public places, men ran the office, took liberties with the secretarial pool, stayed hidden in the closet, kept liquor bottles in their offices and drank heavily throughout the work day, among other things.

“Madmen” has triggered a re-evaluation of contributions of the Baby Boomers.  It’s not just litter along the highways and in our parks, which still exists, but not to the same extent, thanks to Keep America Beautiful, the EPA, Lady Byrd Johnson, Earth Days, recycling and much more.  It’s expanding fuller participation in broad aspects of society (work, study, voting, athletics) on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, ability, age and so on.   It’s seat belts and car seats for children; it’s awareness of the costs of war; it’s foreign policy based on human rights and development, not just security; it’s decreasing the threat of atomic war.

What’s striking about some of these is that the accomplishments were grass-roots movements or campaigns.  Our most significant achievements were not government-run, but government played catch-up to campaigns already underway, such as adversion to tobacco or seat belts.  As a result, these changes are deeply ingrained, ensured to elicit the kind of reaction viewers had to Donald Draper throwing a beer can into the woods.

So, maybe we’re not as great as the Greatest, but we didn’t entirely waste our time on this planet either.  Give yourselves a break, boomers.

NYFD Door Panel from 9/11. Photo: Smithsonian Museum

In connection with the tenth anniversary of the attacks on New York City and Washington DC, the Smithsonian Museum of American History put together an exhibit commemorating that history-changing day.  My wife and I stood in line for 90 minutes to enter the small room, which contained four tables of artifacts, one each for New York, Washington, Pennsylvania and the Transportation Security Administration.   Yes, the last one seemed oddly lacking the parallelism of the first three.

Firefighters’ equipment, a beeper, survivors’ photograph from the stairwell, an ID tag, a firetruck door twisted by heat and , a uniform were among the items I vaguely remember displayed.  More clear was the reverent, bordering-on-sacred hushed tones from the long line of people slowly winding their way around the room.  We were told of the uniqueness of these displays, on tables with no glass between the viewer and the artifact. 

Yet, the most memorable display was a television set, re-running the morning’s news clips, starting with the pointless chatter of Michael Jordan’s comeback to the NBA and winding through to the almost off-handed announcement of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center all the way through the lead anchors getting to the station and taking over the non-stop news through the rest of the day. 

This television reel portrayed better than any artifact on the tables our journey that day, passing from our innocence to the emergence of a changed world.  It was certainly more emotional, more riveting.   We wanted to hit the pause button and reclaim that lost epoch; we wanted the rest of Good Morning America to continue as planned, with stories about new diets or small-town oddities. 

What brought this to mind now, six months later, was a recent re-playing on National Geographic of  “The Lost JFK Tapes.”   Re-watching the motorcade winding its way through Dallas, with Jackie and JFK transported me back to the nine year-old riveted to the television that fall weekend, wishing that the motorcade would make its way to the luncheon where he was to speak before the assembled business elite of Dallas. 

It reminded me of my visit last month to Atlanta and the Martin Luther King National Historic Site.  The humble wagon which carried King’s casket through Atlanta, the pictures of his childhood, the civil rights walk of fame, the Ebenezer Baptist Church all paled in contrast to two videos – his Dream speech in Washington DC and, especially, his Promised Land speech the night before he died, where he predicted his end. 

Do other film moments evoke such instant, emotive history?  Perhaps the Challenger liftoff or the first moon landing.  Certainly the tsunami disasters are best portrayed by video.  And, what does this mean for museums, seeking to tell a story, if visitors could just as easily have stayed at home and watched the moment from their living room flat screen or laptop or mobile phone?  Or for historians trying to write the story when the video allows the viewer to see for themselves, not through the words of an interpreter?

As we approach the tenth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, we find ourselves consumed with remembrances and interpretations of that day, and its impact on our lives since.

Smithsonian 9/11 Exhibit. Photo credit: J Dickson

We are as consumed with these as we were riveted to television that day, watching over and over again the unimaginable images of planes flying into the buildings and of buildings collapsing.  So many of us have our own story to tell of that day, where we were, how we found out, and, incredibly, how we knew someone in the buildings, on their way to the buildings, or caught up in the rescue efforts.

My own story is set in an airplane, flying across the Atlantic with my son, landing in London to learn that something terrible had just happened by the mere question of the rental car agent who asked “Are you American?”

I have a family member who was an EMT who was in the area when the towers fell (and survived.)  I have a colleague whose son was late to work that morning and never entered the building before it was hit.

We all have our own stories as well of our response to that day, of friends and family in combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, of being lied to, and in my case, trying to defend to foreign partners our government’s actions based on this misinformation.

We have lived with and adapted to the heightened security, most evident in our travel but also in and around our monuments and workplaces.

This is still not history, though, as we are still living it.  We are still fighting wars as a consequence, we are still in a state of heightened security, and we are still living with the debt run up to fight those wars.

History will come when our soldiers have returned home, when our economy is responding to other challenges, when we are no longer x-rayed and photographed while trying to board planes.  Historic understanding tells us that these realities will not endure.  Just as the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the end of the Cold War, this 9/11 chapter will also end, replaced by the next development, hopefully without the horrific or far-reaching consequences that those 20 hijackers unleashed ten years ago.

The Smithsonian Museum of American History has now an exhibit of 9/11.  As the repository for all artifacts collected from New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, the museum has put a small sampling on display, on tables out from behind glass cases for people to see and read and experience the short stories of each item.   We stood in line for over an hour to enter the small room, with four tables on which lay these artifacts – the cell phone used by New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani, a doll collected from the scene of the two towers, badges of office workers and rescue workers from all three sites or a door from a crushed fire engine.

The most powerful, though, remains the video of the television news, unfolding that morning, with Good Morning America starting off with the breaking news that Michael Jordan was considering a comeback to the NBA that season, followed by the initial reports of an explosion at the World Trade Center, and then the live coverage of the second plane flying into the second tower, the fire at the Pentagon, the crash in the Pentagon and the collapse of the two towers.

The anniversary will focus on the heroes, of the day and since.  And there are many, and they deserve our gratitude and admiration.  History will also record their actions that day, that year and the decade since.  But what history will also have to try to capture was the sheer sense of disbelief, of paralysis as we sat and watched over and over again these images.   That was our collective reality.