When I originally decided to write a blog on the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks I intended to write a critique of the coverage of the event and the multiple remembrances both on TV and in peoples communities. I am not one to get teary eyed over past events or to find ways I connect with an event. I usually find anniversaries of large tragic event to be contrived and mawkish. I hate listening to people opine on the historical relevance of the attack or the significance it will have on our future. These are things that we cannot really know we are too close to the events, to intimately tied to them to fully understand their impact upon us as a society and country. I have seen and turned off many a show that has this celebrity or that personality telling us the significance of what happened on that day. Why do I need a celebrity to tell me the significance of an event. It is condescending and frankly irritating to me.
Also I feel like the last decade has been a decade of absolutes, In all the years that have passed since those days I have heard so many absolutes. The one thing that this day should have taught us as a people is that our need for absolutes brings us no comfort. There is no us against them, there is no black and white, there are grays, we have had grievous horrors done to us and we have in turn done grievous horrors to others.
America like many other countries in history was going about its daily business, when out of nowhere two planes hit two buildings in our largest city. Then, a plane hit the very heart of our military, and one just fell out of the sky. We were sucker punched, two body blows, a punch to the head, and for good measure a kick while we were down. It was a declaration of war but why? We feel innocent of any crime. It is simple you can agree or not but we were attacked because of a long history of the western world using and abusing the rest of the world to its own ends. Whether it was fair for us to be attacked for innocent lives to be taken for past and present slights, I do not know, it does not feel fair. Whether the death that proceeded the attacks, is worth it, I do not thing so. But the past is the past. What do we do as a people, with hope, I would like to think that we move on and treat the people and the world around us a bit fairer.
Memorials...I find the pentagon memorial to be the most comforting to me it is made up of 183 benches. I think this is a beautiful thought a place to sit and reflect, still and quiet.
I have had a harder time writing this post then any other before. I though I am so far removed, still have a mix of emotions. Anger, for the actual event and for the aftermath, sadness, hope, so many others....This post feels unfinished to me and sort of disjointed but maybe that is the way that is should be. These past ten years feel the same to me unfinished, disjointed, we are an America staggering about under the weight of this day looking for a place to fit in.
