What Year?

September 11 -- what year? 30 percent of Americans don't know My first reaction....WHAT? Of course, the title is a tad misleading, but not much.

Some 30 percent of Americans cannot say in what year the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington took place, according to a poll published in the Washington Post newspaper.

While the country is preparing to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives and shocked the world, 95 percent of Americans questioned in the poll were able to remember the month and the day of the attacks, according to Wednesday's edition of the newspaper.

But when asked what year, 30 percent could not give a correct answer.

Of that group, six percent gave an earlier year, eight percent gave a later year, and 16 percent admitted they had no idea whatsoever.

This portion makes me think that the readers of the Washington Post are less informed than the rest of the country. However, reading the rest, I find a partial explanation.

This memory black hole is essentially the problem of the older crowd: 48 percent of those who did not know were between the ages of 55 and 64, and 47 percent were older than 65, according to the poll.

The Post telephone survey was carried out July 21-24 among 1,002 randomly selected adults. The margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.

Ok, being almost (a couple more years... don't rush me) in that group of people, I can understand, to a degree, the lack of memory. However, it's rather disconcerting to think that something that happened barely five years ago, had such a tremendous affect on the entire world, could so easily be forgotten. Perhaps my original thought, that the readers of the Washington Post are not very well informed, was correct? It's long been my opinion that we should have reminders on a daily basis, but then, we'd have the same problem we have now, but from a different direction. People will become immune. H/T: Shining City Atop a Hill