BLASHPHEMY!

Today is September 11th the anniversary of the terror attacks in Manhattan, Washington DC and Shanksville, PA. We have big events in Manhattan and Washington but what happened in Shanksville always sticks with me more.

Before I go off on a sidetrack here though, it’s the eighth anniversary and again there is the same ceremony, the ‘reading of the names.’

I’m going to utter the unthinkable, it’s time to move on.

It’s not that remembering the day isn’t important, it’s not to diminish what happened but, we don’t focus so intently on Pearl Harbor Day. We acknowledge it on a level but, we don’t obsess over it. Thinking about it, I don’t readily believe the nation ground to a halt eight years after the event either. A memorial was built and there is a remembrance to mark the day for those who choose to do so.

Neither should we do that with 9/11.

I sometimes wonder if our society here hasn’t become a nation of drama queens. This publicizing of grief seeming to be more about garnering attention for the bereaved than about true mourning. I always see these kinds of things on the news where a person gets shot or is in an accident or something along those lines (whatever the latest news event we focus on so ratings can increase) and suddenly a makeshift memorial springs up.

LOOK! I LEFT A CANDLE!

People die each and every day. It happens all arounnd us and we can be certain one day our number will be up too. Every day people die for the most pointless of reasons, creating thousands of small tragedies for the people they’re connected to.

Life doesn’t stop though.

We move forward, the world moves forward.

While 9/11 was and is something of a pivotal event for our nation, I believe the time is coming where we need to move past it. By obsessing over our grief, by indulging ourselves in it (and I say this with the greatest sense of irony), THE TERRORISTS WILL HAVE WON!

I never have been so crazy about some of the things that came out of that day eight years ago and am frustrated by the things that have been forgotten in the years since.

Perhaps the most terrifying thing for anyone who cares about personal liberties and freedom should be the fact of how easily, how readily, how quickly our government was able to shut the nation down. How all the borders were sealed, all the planes removed from the sky, how everything came rapdily to a grinding halt. On the one hand it was an amazing feat but since then we have often been told our government needs even more powers to insure our security. In retrospect and looking at what our government was so easily able to accomplish, I think it is sobering and a warning to us moving forward about how we should be wary of giving over to much power to the institutions we choose to rule over us.

If you can shut down a nation this large in just a few short hours, how much more power does the government need?

We have increased security at airports now and we’ve spent millions (possibly billions) of dollars to that end. People take their shoes off, they can’t take things onto planes with them (even the most innocuous of items) but all that money was just for show, it really wasn’t necessary to spend to the level we spent and even then the money that was spent only made air travel more difficult and onerous (putting more secure doors between the cockpit and the passengers probably was the smartest thing to be done and between that and having air marshals undercover on flights may have been all that was necessary).

Yes, it’s not about common sense.

What we‘ve forgotten from that day?

Well, for one PEOPLE WERE NICER TO EACH OTHER. I mean people were just more humane and patient with the people around them. It was something especially apparent in New York. While most of us were shell-shocked, people just went out of their way to be courteous and respectful of one and other.

People worked together. Not just on a personal level but in the government as well. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if some of the idiots running around ranting and raving about their political opponents could remember that? (No one Republican or Democrat is getting a break on that in my book) If we had just a sliver of that today, I have to imagine our government would be a lot more effective and more things would get done.

People volunteered. It appeared a lot of people in our country finally recognized what it meant to accept their civic duty.

It seems to me a lot of those things have been forgotten in the years since September 11th. Yeah, we’re real good at the public spectacle of mourning but wouldn’t it be better, wouldn’t it show more acknowledgement and respect to the people who lost their lives if we held those lessons close to our hearts especially on the anniversary of such a tragic event? Instead of having them read off the names in a pit where a bunch of people died, wouldn’t it be better to rememmber how much our nation pulled together in the days and weeks after the tragedy?

The Shanksville thing?

You know, that appears to be an afterthought in all of the marking fo the day but to me those people on that plane, for me they embodied the lesson to bring out of that day. Just as people were nicer to each other and all the things I believe we’ve forgotten as listed above, what happened on United Flight 93 was Ground Zero for it. The passengers stopped something terrible from happening at the sacrifice of their own lives. This is not a slight against any of the rescuers who lost their lives on that day because they exemplify that too but, those people when they found out what was going on decided to put a stop to it. Even now thinking about it, I am amazed.

It’s what I like to think is the spirit of our nation, what our national identity is and should always be about (many different people of different backgrounds coming together).

I’m sorry for the people who were lost but I think we should move on. In that I mean, stop with this spectacle and start by making this day into something productive.