A Sept. 11 editorial: Whatever the number, a need to remember

Fourteen.

It's not a number with much magic for commemoration. For some reason, we like our memories to come in multiples of five or 10. And when it comes to sad reflections, we sometimes would just as soon not observe the anniversaries at all. They are the past, after all. What value is there in merely methodical repetition?

But remembering September 11, 2001, a 14-year eyeblink behind us, is no merely mechanical routine, no pointless wallow in melancholy. It is something perhaps just short of an obligation to the future.

Whether six years behind us or eight years or 11 or 13, the horrific acts of 9/11 left an indelible imprint on our present. They led to the creation of an entire new cabinet branch, the Homeland Security Department, somehow distinct from the U.S. Defense Department.

They led to a war in Afghanistan that has been won and lost so many times no one quite remembers its origins or its objectives. And to a similar war in Iraq with its own unquantifiable outcomes.

They color the national debate over a proposed nuclear arms treaty with Iran. They resurface in the folds of smaller, periodic outrages at military bases, recruiting posts and major marathons. They lurk within the shock of the occasional suburban teenager captured en route to make jihad with terror forces in the Middle East.

In all these things, suburban lives have been forever entangled. To be sure, these include the families who today remember suburban-linked 9/11 victims Todd Beamer. Andrew King. Jeffrey P. Mladenik. Jason Oswald. Robert Rasmussen. Sue Sauer. Mark Schurmeier. Dan Shanower, Mari-Rae Sopper and Mary Lenz Wieman.

But there are thousands of others, too. The families of military men and women who did not come home from America's post-9/11 combat missions. The fighters who returned forever maimed, some physically, some psychologically.

These are neighbors not to be forgotten, as the underlying act that led to their suffering — and our sorrow for their suffering — is also not to be forgotten.

People have long sought comfort in the magic of numbers, finding it in mystical fives and threes and sevens and elevens. Twelve has its ancient adherents; 13 its dark mischief. Somehow, 14 doesn't carry any particular weight of its own to make an impression on our consciousness.

So, we must make the impressions ourselves. Take a moment today to reflect on those horrible pictures 14 years ago and the eerily silent skies over O'Hare that followed. Remember those lives directly affected on that day and all the days since, and consider how all of our lives and outlooks have been affected.

It is not just a routine nod to the past. It is not even merely a reflection on the present. It also, as we have amply seen in events over the course of the past 14 years, is a duty to the future.