I

t was just last year that I was 
hurrying 
through 
the 
Diag, 

late for class, when I noticed 

hundreds of American flags staked on 
the lawns. It took me a few minutes 
to remember the day. Sept. 11 — a day 
whose significance bears the same 
weight on the American consciousness 
today as it did in 2001. But with a 
symbol that means vastly different 
things to different people, how could 
an event like Sept. 11 be reduced to the 
flying of a few flags on a university 

campus?

I was born in Santiago de Chile. 

My parents have their own disparate 
experiences of Sept.11. For them, this 
day is ingrained in a collective and 
historical consciousness.

Sept. 11, 1973 was the date of the 

military coup that redefined Chilean 
politics and society. This was the 
beginning of two decades where the 
CIA-backed military took over the 
country under the mantra of national 
reconstruction. 
The 
following 

years would be characterized by 
systematic political repression and the 
persecution and murder of dissidents.

Every year, the eleventh is a day of 

national protests where Chileans of 
all generations march in the streets 
holding posters demanding answers 
for the atrocities that occurred under 
the dictatorship that followed and 
demanding change for its persistent 
political implications. However, not 
everyone in Chile sees this day as a day 
of pain and anger. Some celebrate Sept. 

11 as the day Chile was saved 
from the supposed clutches of 
communism. General Augusto 
Pinochet’s dictatorship, for some, 
represents a neoliberal salvation 
that propelled Chile into the 
modern era. On Chilean soil, 
Sept. 11 represents a symbolic 
moment where the fracture of its 
society is reenacted.

I left Chile before my first 

birthday only to return in 2011. 
I remember going to El Museo 
de la Memoria y Los Derechos 
Humanos, or the Museum of 
Memory 
and 
Human 
Rights 

— a museum that documents 
the 
brutality 
of 
Pinochet’s 

dictatorship. 
I 
remember 

being 13 and walking down the 
dimly lit hallways listening to 
testimonies of those who had 
survived. I can still hear the 
voice of a woman who talked 
about being stripped naked and 
tied to a metal bed frame as she 
was electrocuted by the regime. 
I looked away because I couldn’t 
bring myself to look at her face, 
but when I looked back, I saw 
my mother silently crying in the 
corner of the room. The silence 
was suffocating.

I wonder if here in the United 

States this date has come to mark 
historical ignorance. We talk 
briefly about Sept. 11 in school. 
We talk about the tragic loss of 
life. We talk about the heroes 
of New York City who worked 

endlessly to find those trapped in the 
rubble of the twin towers. But while 
Americans of all political stripes 
commemorate the victims and heroes 
of 9/11, do we ever really talk about 
its aftermath or the subsequent wars? 
Unlike in Chile, these consequences 
are almost never up for debate. In 
effect, does this silence cheapen those 
deaths with a patriotic rhetoric about 
keeping America safe?

There was a time — and perhaps we 

are still in the time — when questioning 
those in charge is not the natural order 
of a democracy, but rather a blatant 
attack on America. To question is to be 
anti-patriotic. The fear and sorrow of 
2001 has become a fiber of apathy in a 
cloth of patriotism. It is a resignation 
to let politics run its course.

My own history is marked by the 

aftermath of two distinct historical 
events. Sept. 11 has become a historic 
reflux that won’t go away with a 
prescribed dose of patriotism, fear, 
or apathy. It comes back as an itch 
that demands to be scratched. In 
Chile, it erupts time and time again 
as anger towards a dictatorship whose 
constitution is still the law. On one 
side you have mothers holding posters 
of their children whose bodies are 
likely lost in the desert. On the other 
side, 
you 
have 
recently-appointed 

government ministers questioning the 
validity of El Museo de la Memoria as a 
leftist dramatization of history. This is 
a tear in the fabric of Chilean history, 
a tear that will never fully repair itself.

A world away, in the U.S., resignation 

to fear blanketed by a rhetoric of 
patriotism has become an excuse for 
hate. Did the pain of 9/11 help foster a 
narrative that we use today to divide 
the citizens of our country? What will 
come of the memory of Sept. 11? To 
have an identity defined by two critical 
moments that share the same date is to 
have a day on which you are reminded 
on both fronts that history doesn’t just 
disappear like the bodies in the sand or 
under rubble but that it lingers like a 
scar. 

2B

Managing Statement Editor:

Brian Kuang

Deputy Editors:

Colin Beresford

Jennifer Meer

Photo Editor:

Amelia Cacchione

Editor in Chief:

Alexa St. John

Managing Editor:

Dayton Hare

Copy Editors:

Elise Laarman

Finntan Storer

Wednesday, September 12, 2018// The Statement 

Patriotism: A fabric woven of 
anger and fear

statemen
t

THE MICHIGAN DAILY | SEPTEMBER 12, 2018

BY MARTINA VILLALOBOS, COLUMNIST

DESIGN BY CASEY TIN

