There's tons of that already. Do what you feel is the right thing to do.
I will also refrain from my usual NC 17 language for the entirety of this post. Not particularly because I consider this a solemn occasion, but because there has been enough utterly deplorable filth already associated with 9/11, its aftermath, and the commentary thereof. I don't feel the need to add to that, (see first paragraph for examples.)
No, the title of this post is a statement of impossibility: Forgetting 9/11.
I see posts on other blogs, in newspapers, in sig files: "Never Forget." "Always Remember," "I Won't Forget" "I'll Always Remember," and the more disturbing "Never Forgive."
I don't think we need the reminders. I think we all know. I don't think we could forget if we wanted to.
There are certain events in our lives that are permanently etched into us. They burn their way into our memories, and leave scars just like a hot poker to our flesh. They carry more "Gravity" and we orbit around them. Audrey Niffenegger uses that as a science-fiction-like trope for her protagonist Henry DeTamble in her novel "The Time Traveller's Wife," but it's a metaphor too. We ALL do it. We ALL revisit the same events over and over in our memories. Dad's acquaintance and fellow fictional character, Billy Pilgrim did much the same thing in Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five," spending the rest of his life time travelling to the events he saw unfold as a prisoner of war during the bombing of Dresden, (which was once again a metaphor for my grandcreator, Kurt Vonnegut's inability to escape the gravitational pull of those Dark Matter Days he spent there.)
We ALL remember EXACTLY where we were when we heard the news, just as everyone from the previous generation remembers EXACTLY where they were in November of 1963 when they heard that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas.
I remember where I was. I was standing in the library of the high school I had graduated from years before, watching the towers fall on live television. The irony for me was that I was standing there watching the whole thing unfold with a man who I had stood beside at the top of those very towers almost a decade before. It was all so surreal.
I've heard it in conversations with people over the last week or so: "9th Anniversary...Hard to believe...Has it been that long?"
Yes, it's been that long...It's been longer in many ways. Some people can't even remember what the New York Skyline looked like with the towers. Some people can't remember what it was like not to live in a world where "Terrorism" wasn't just something that effected OTHER countries.
In my previous rants, (blog entries, posts, whatever you want to call them,) I have likened the American Socioeconomic machine to a vast organism. I'm not the first guy to do this. Thomas Hobbes wrote about it in his "Leviathan." But it is a good model, and I think we can understand and grasp things a little easier with that analogy.
I was considering likening 9/11 on a microcosmic scale to battling cancer, (something that the non-fictional side of D. Gilbert Trout has witnessed a bit too much in the last 3 years.) But that doesn't exactly fit.
I considered likening it to a being shot in a vital organ, but that doesn't exactly work either. Being shot in a vital organ is an act of willful violence, sometimes random, but usually willful. I would liken a gunshot wound on a macrocosmic scale to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of '41.
I've decided that microcosmically, 9/11 was more like the Leviathan organism that is US being attacked by a mad dog.
It came out of nowhere. Sure, there were signs. The dog had been growling for a while, and we KNEW there was a potential situation brewing, but the attack itself was sudden, violent, and damn near killed us. It went right for the jugular with the intent of chewing out our central nervous and cardiovascular systems, (the economic and legislative centers of the country.) It didn't have a gun like Japan. All it had were teeth, claws, and pent up rage that exploded in an almost random act of violence.
Yeah, there's a lot of argument from conspiracy theorists about 9/11 being an inside job, or that there was previous intelligence and the events COULD have been stopped, but to give George W. Bush's administration credit, (which is NOT something you will hear from me very often,) how CAN you plan for things like that?
If I reported to the police that tomorrow a car full of midgets dressed as clowns was going to drive into the town square, jump out of the car singing "Jingle Bell Rock," and then proceed to mow down all bystanders with sub machine guns, I don't think they'd take it seriously.
So, a bunch of pissed off guys armed with boxcutters are going to hijack some planes and kamikaze crash them into our centers of government and commerce?
That's not an intelligence report. That's the plot to a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.
I think it can only be taken seriously in retrospect.
I likened the terrorists, (Al Qaeda in this case,) to a mad dog. How do you negotiate with a mad dog? When the aggressor is another macrocosmic person, (i.e. Japan, which is itself a DIFFERENT Macroorganism Person, complete with it's own organ systems and structure,) it's easy...You declare war. The fight has already started, and you just keep your head down, your fists up, and keep going until you're dead, or the other guy is dead, or one or the other of you backs down.
But Al Qaeda is NOT a government. It doesn't have any "Official Representation" Sure, it might have support, but it's still like a mad stray dog. It might sleep under Afghanistan's porch. It might eat table scraps left for it by Iraq, but can either of those Sociopolitical Organism's actually CONTROL it? Probably not. It does not heel. It does not obey. All it understands is pain and abuse, and has been conditioned to respond with pain and abuse.
All you can really do with a mad dog is put it down. Put it out of its misery. Sure, there is the option of "rehabilitation," but reported success rates there are questionable.
So, We as an Organism survive the attack. We have to rehabilitate. We fight off the infection. Our immune systems grow stronger. But forever burned into our psyches is the memory of that attack. We orbit it in our minds. Moments of synchronicity cause us to flash back to it. And worst of all, we develop a huge phobia toward dogs.
We berate dog owners. We call for bans on specific breeds. And we lash out.
We don't think about what made the dog crazy to begin with; The beatings, the abuse, the starvation.
The Middle East has been our kicking ground for years. We didn't want a damn thing to do with them until we needed oil, and then we go in and take it. If we don't take it outright, we set up puppet governments with "friendly folks" at the the top who will give us oil, and we really pretend not to notice when they abuse and neglect their citizens.
THIS is what makes the mad dogs.
It's really too late to stop too. The damage is done. You can't placate a rabid animal. You can't really expect their owner to control it.
All we can REALLY do is be wary of mad dogs, and be prepared to defend ourselves the next time we encounter one.
We won't forget. We can't forget. We're the walking wounded, we flinch every time a dog barks. We answer their aggression with aggression. Aggression that makes MORE mad dogs.
And so it goes...
