Oct. 7 becomes part of the awful shorthand of our lives

The attack on Israel by Hamas last month was gruesome and shocking, bloody and vicious. We saw and heard the testimony of survivors, in some cases even saw video of the repulsive savagery. The slaughter unleashed an Israeli assault on Gaza with more destruction and more civilian casualties. 

As the weeks have passed, six of them now, we still recoil from what we have been witnessing. But we also have started to see a linguistic adaptation in news accounts and personal conversations in which the event is referred to simply as Oct. 7.

Oct. 7.

And so it has become part of the awful shorthand of our lives.

We turn events into dates that resonate by themselves, the most obvious being Sept. 11. You don't need a year, a location, a description, or any detail at all, for a listener to understand instantly what you mean when you say Sept. 11.

Where were you on Sept. 11?

For earlier generations, there was Nov. 22, the date of President John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963. And even older, Dec. 7, the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. And, related, Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, the days in 1945 when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It is no accident that the dates we remember commemorate tragedies. Those are the events our hearts and brains find more difficult to reconcile. Nor is it an accident that these tragedies seemed to come out of nowhere, like tornadoes on a calm and sunny day.

Giving what happened a date-name is a way for us to assemble our memories and compartmentalize them, a way to avoid dredging up the visceral parts that are too painful. We know they're there, but we'd rather not revisit them. We say the date and touch on the outline of the horror, hearing its echo thrumming deep inside without having to relive the trauma. Giving it a date allows us to build a layer of callous between then and now.

So we say Sept. 11 and we don't have to experience again the acrid smell and the billowing smoke and the tumbling towers and the posted pieces of papers asking desperately about missing loved ones and the endless funerals.

So we say Nov. 22 and we don't have to recall the utter shock, the loss of what innocence we had left, the bloodstained pink suit, the solemn funeral procession through the nation's capitol, and the indescribable sadness of watching a little boy salute his father's coffin on the day he turned 3.

So we say Dec. 7 and we don't have to envisage the violence that propelled our nation into World War II, killing 2,403 Americans, 1,177 of them on a single ship.

And we say Aug. 6 and Aug. 9 and we don't have to come to grips with the previously unimaginable scale of death and destruction and the way life in those two cities was instantly and irrevocably altered.

These dates become points of demarcation, ways to delineate what came before and what followed after. 

There are other dates, too, not as universally accepted but instantly recognized by some. There is June 6, the day Kennedy's brother Robert died from an assassin's bullet in 1968, and April 4 of that year, when Martin Luther King was killed. People in Newtown, Connecticut will always remember Dec. 14, when a gunman slaughtered elementary school students in Sandy Hook in 2012. For me, Dec. 8, when John Lennon was struck down in 1980.

Human nature being what it is, it's not clear how long these dates will retain their power of instant cultural significance. It might be hard to imagine now that Oct. 7 and Sept. 11 will fade in their capacity for evocation, but it also is true that Dec. 7 has little resonance for young folks today. 

And that's unfortunate. The past is past but shorthand or not, we must remember what we need to remember.

Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.

By Michael Dobie

michael.dobie@newsday.commwdobie

Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.