After the Berlin Wall fell, tourists, eager to hold onto the last vestiges of the Cold War, bought pieces of the Wall. And when part of the Pentagon fell on Sept. 11, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld was eager to hold onto a piece of the plane that hit it. Literally.

According to an investigative report put together by the Justice Department, Rumsfeld and a high-ranking FBI agent kept ”souvenirs“ from the crime scenes at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, respectively. Is Rumsfeld worried others will forget what happened on Sept. 11? He certainly acts that way when he shows all visitors to his office that piece of the plan as a reminder of the events of that day.  While museums do this as a business, they do so at least partially to teach younger generations what happened before their time. My guess is Rumsfeld doesn’t have too many visitors to his office who were born in the short time that has passed since that fateful day, though.

American culture has long had an obsession with ”remembering“ certain events, particularly Sept. 11 and the Holocaust. Moves like Rumsfeld’s are meant to tell us both ”always remember to remember“ and ”never forget to remember,“ two sides of the same coin that remind us that all Americans lost part of themselves that day. Suffering and loss of individuals becomes the property of those like Rumsfeld that feel they need something to remember those events by since the memories in their heads and the footage shown on CNN apparently don’t suffice.

Sure, everyone wants to possess a little piece of history, but there is something peculiar and disturbing about this method of doing so. Not only is it extremely opportunistic for these men vested with significant federal authority to feel the need to take — and then show off — souvenirs from scenes where thousands of people died; it is also juvenile.

While 9/11 may have impacted the entire nation — indeed, the entire world — taking souvenirs such as parts of the plane suggests that these men, who were only affected by virtue of their citizenship and positions of authority, thought the memory itself wasn’t enough. They needed something tangible to show as evidence that part of them had been injured that day as well. With a little something to remember 9/11 by, they seem to wipe the blood off of their own hands for tragedies in other parts of the world that have killed hundreds of people and their failure to stop the events of 9/11 before they happened. And by possessing souvenirs of that history, they also elevate that event to a special status in the nation’s collective memory, whereby other crimes and acts of terrorism get forgotten — and actual suffering and loss experienced by families involved in those tragedies as well as 9/11 get kicked to the curb.

Laura Nathan-Garner