I know it is September 11, but I’ll leave the remembering to others. I don’t want to remember. Maybe you do. Maybe you want to reflect on those who lost their lives that day, nine long years ago. I was angry. I was incredibly angry. But mostly I was sad because I knew it would turn us into bad people and make us do bad things. We’re trying to turn things around now, but look at the news. Look at what we’re discussing. Burning Korans and banning mosques, that’s what we’re discussing.
Not long before 9/11, I had one of those moments. I was walking around Manhattan, taking in the diversity and the peaceful interaction of the people. And I thought to myself how great New York was, and how much of a model it was for the country and the world of the future. That’s what I mourned on the night of 9/11 as I tried to go to sleep. New York is still great, but the country has never been further away from their model.
So, I’m not going to spend my day thinking back. There’s is nothing back there for me.
I just read someone’s hour-by-hour recollection of the events that transpired that day.
Regardless of your opinion regarding the propriety of our government’s reaction to those events, or your assessment about how the event may have adversely altered our nation’s values, the emotions that one experiences reading an article of that nature are universal emotions that are worth experiencing for their own sake.
In my view, taking an hour to relive the emotions of that day is healthy.
Fear, anger and despair are worth experiencing for their own sake? Huh? What salutary emotions are you talking about that have special relation to 9/11?
How about sadness, sympathy, compassion?
The people are dead and buried. If you knew one of them, my condolences, but it doesn’t seem you do. We all have death in our lives, sooner or later. Why does that death get to be special?
It’s wonderful that you’ve found a way to gratify yourself by consuming other peoples’ emotions like special candy.
There is no such thing as, “Other people’s emotions”. If another human being feels an emotion, at some level so do we.
We are One. Isn’t that the foundation of Progressiveism?
Unbelievable.
Think and feel what you want, when you want.
People move ahead. In my view, that’s healthy.
There’s not that many days when what’s on TV is important, and today isn’t one of them. They’ll never abandon the search for that elusive big audience.
I’ve just read at antiwar.com that the U.S. is still in a ‘state of emergency’ and has been since September 2001. What is this ’emergency’ all about anyway? Obama has just extended it for another year. What is all hits hysterical nonsense about? Of course it gives the president and other authorities special powers. What for? This situation will never end. The ‘Cult of September 11, 2001’ has become a whore’s mission. It’s disgusting. by the way, who would have ever thought that the vile charlatan in Gainsville, Florida, who proposed to burn Quarans, had a following in Cologne, Germany, and was accused of intimidating and extorting his followers. Eventually the authorities pulled the plug on him and he returned to the USA (see Spiegel on line).
Don’t forget that he, and Rush Limpballs, were high school classmates.
Where? I knew they had high schools for performing arts, math, and stuff. Didn’t know they had them for grifters.
guess Sarah Palin went to that same high school before she dropped out
amazing fact – who else was in their class (Jack Abramov?? Madov?)
Chaney, the puppet master?
maybe Dr. Phibes was in that class too.
Calvin…
If you believe that the fact you put forth is an ironic trick of the Universe, worthy of humor and gratitude…good for you! (God really does have one hell (get it!) sense of humor).
If you believe there is some causal connection…(can’t think of the words)
Thank you Boo, for having the guts to come out and express resistance to the forced and faked sentimentality over the anniversary of a horrific crime. Mourning is necessary and healthy. Clinging to death, suffering, and destruction becomes, at some point, pathological.
The hard, some would say unfeeling, fact is that most of us didn’t know any of the victims personally, and that their deaths in the larger scheme of things are no more tragic or significant than those of the guy down the street with the heart attack or the woman across the country in the car crash.
This anniversary marks a good time to think about things like the influence of imperialism and religion, tolerance and nativism, anger and forgiveness, mourning and forgetting. We seem to have reached the point where it no longer triggers such responses, at least in the public/media sphere, and have instead entered the pathological path of ginned-up hate, fear, and anger, all masking and denying our impotence, with which we justify lashing out at imaginary perps.
On that first Sept 11 many of us foresaw that NYC would never be the same again. If we are to mark this day, maybe it should be to celebrate that our forebodings were wrong, that the City is alive and well, a living testament to how civilization provides its greatest creations with the resilience to triumph over the most evil of crimes and disasters.
Dave.
..”their deaths…are no more tragic…”
But different. Read the accounts written that day.
And for God’s Sakes…get in touch with your emotions. Intellectualized Anger doesn’t do anyone any good.
Well, just keep in mind the usual pearls of wisdom that we white folks use to make ourselves feel better!
It’s just a few bad apples.
Not ALL white folks are bigots.
EVERYONE can be bigoted.
They’re so oversensitive.
If those don’t make you feel better, then I’m pretty sure you must hate America.
“We White Folks…”
I remember reading about a young lady in Lebanon. She said every where she turned there were posters of Hezbollah and Christian militia martyrs. She said they are not allowed to forget. I understand now. Martyrs are politicized here in the U.S. Its the same there in Lebanon. The dead are used to fit the agendas of the powerful.
I posted the following on another blog a little while ago:
Today, September 11, 2010:
About 24,000 children under the age of five will die as a result of poverty,
about 9,000 people will die of water-related disease,
about 800,000,000 people will go hungry,
about 7,000 people will die of malaria,
about 7,000 people will die of causes due to air or water pollution,
about 500-1,000 people will die as casualties of war or conflict in the world.
These statistics do not in any way dishonor memorial observations for the almost 3,000 that died on September 11, 2001, in Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. But they are a reminder that we have a lot of work to do to repair the world.
Tikkun olam.
I don’t like looking back, remember, but there is no reason to relive 9/11 each year. Hint: MSNBC replaying the morning of 9/11 broadcast.
It only reminds me that 8 years of Republican Rule failed to catch OBL. And now it is Obama’s job to do what W failed to do.
Does anyone want to take me up on this bet…
Based on actuarial tables, I should still be alive.
Twenty years from now, the hated “W” will generally be considered a much better President than Obama. And it won’t even be close.
I’ll bet my Social Security Check.
Anyone?
no. The Katrina disaster will forever be tied to W and his lying was there for all to see. “Good Job Brownie.”
Much better? Whatever….
You have a lot with conservative columnist Paul Mulshine. I agree with you both http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine/2010/09/lets_not_remember_september_11.html
Oddly, my strongest memories of 9/11 are of the one year anniversary. Yes on 9/11/01 I saw the smoke on the horizon from a hilltop in NJ. Yes I drove home from work thinking about how I would explain what happened to my kids, ages 2, 6 and 8 at the time. And I know people who died that day.
But my strongest memory was one year later sitting up all night in a dark room getting drunk worrying about how messed up and crazy our response as a nation had become. My real loss was felt that day. The loss of bright future for my country, myself and my kids.
And it has not gotten any better since and I don’t think it will.