For the twelfth time now, media has officially gone somber for the occasion. Bringing out its sad music and mourning wear, especially for its normally flirty hostesses. A day to pay homage before going back into their normal stupid shit. I'll admit, this September 11th like last year's (for me at least) just came and went without acknowledgement.
I can't be bothered with it anymore. This "national day of mourning" I feel has long since crossed the line from a genuine expression of emotion to exploitative. It's one thing to acknowledge sadness but it's quite another to use it to drum up business or an agenda and that's what I feel the "holiday" of September 11th has become. It's officially called "Patriot Day" and while no one calls it that, I think just like the other day of infamy in this country, "Pearl Harbor Day" (December 7th), it too will just fade away but not before the big anniversaries - the 20th and 25th (and so forth) - into little blurbs in the headlines becoming less and less acknowledged with each passing year.
But for me, it's just exploitative. There are enough survivors from that heinous attack. It's their day now, not the nation's. Leave them alone, stop reading the names of those who died that day, and quit it with the phony jingoism and easy patriotism the day affords. Stop using them as symbols to unite us in supporting wars that don't need to be fought.
I think back to the opposite expression: the end of a trying war. V-J Day was on September 2, 1945 and we've seen the pictures...it was a hell of a celebration (for the United States at least). World War II was finally over. And I imagine there were similar, albeit smaller, parties through what remained of the 1940s on that day. But how long can one keep celebrating victory over one's enemy before it slips from a meaningful celebration over the end of a great war to what amounts to "rubbing it in"?
And that's what brings me back to September 11th. Yes, the first anniversary was meaningful and it probably should've stopped there as we had taken our pound of flesh from Afghanistan. But before even the second anniversary it had been used as a backdrop to justify an invasion of Iraq and to maintain the growing "security" state apparatus. By the tenth anniversary, one of the big anniversaries, the failure of our "War on Terror" was more than apparent and I remember acknowledging it as such (I'm certainly using that word a lot, aren't I?) but being introspective about what we as a nation had done to others and ourselves in response to that terrorist attack was not fashionable to say the least of it. I'm not when it will ever be fashionable to criticize our responses in the mainstream.
I'm not sure where I'm going with all this so I'll end it here. September 11th is just another day...as it should be.
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