Sleeping it off

So the big anniversary of September 11 is over, thank goodness.  Yes, it was a tremendously shocking loss of life, the lives of thousands of my fellow Americans.  Yes, I remember where I was.  Yes, I was scared and heartbroken and enraged.  And yes, I would call myself a patriot.

I’m just not a fan of the whole “anniversary” thing.  I understand that for singular events, that’s the point on which we anchor the event in question, but most events can’t really, or at least shouldn’t be, anchored on a single day, this one included.  It suggests that the most relevant aspects of it weren’t equally so the day before or won’t be equally so the day after.  It lets us off the hook for ignoring the importance of the event for the past 10, 15, 50 years, however long it’s been since whatever we “celebrate” happened.  It suggests that we’re not susceptible to an identical event every second of every other day of the year (we are) and that there’s no choice anywhere between forgetting it and being a slave to it (there is).

We were supposed to know why we were a great country on September 10,2001, and before, actually should have never lost sight of it for the past, oh…more than 200 years.  We’ve blown that one repeatedly.  At the very least, we should’ve been able to hold the reminder for at least the past 10, maybe even make a little progress, but look around.  Take a second to really take in the political climate today, not to mention the social climate, of our supposedly great country.  Shouldn’t we be able to see the lessons of 2001?

We’re still blaming the Muslim population at large for the acts of a few who happened to share that characteristic.  Some of us still have to travel to one of a handful of states just to marry the person with whom we plan to spend the rest of our days, only to return “home” where it doesn’t even count.  Is it really that great to be SO patriotic that we’d color the name of our lost loved one onto an American flag or across the names of countless others who were equally loved and equally lost, without giving it a second thought?  We continue to shred a president who’s hardly had even a chance to make a mistake while lauding a president who made many and kept some respect anyway, as well as touting as hopefuls several candidates who seem to have never even read the Constitution.  We vow to “never forget” with the same passion we vow “never again” to allow genocide, while forgetting and allowing even as I type this.

It could be different.  We could stop waiting for the big 5- and 10-year marks commemorating our various tragedies to act like the United States.  We could just LIVE as the “patriots” we claim to be — as the smarter, kinder, gentler Americans we advertise with our bumper stickers and t-shirts and giant foam fingers.  We could lead instead of coerce.  We could tolerate instead of condemn.  We could be proud without being arrogant and insensitive.  We could underpin our nation instead of undermining it.  Hell, just for starters, we could give blood a few times a year, instead of giving once every terrorist attack and ignoring the Red Cross’s pleas for donors for the decade or more in between, or worse, simply spending the energy attacking that organization for being greedy and bureaucratic, as though we’re doing anything better to help in a crisis or, for that matter, doing anything at all.  The still civically comatose third of us could start VOTING…that’d be “patriotic,” wouldn’t it, being engaged in that whole business of being a “democratic republic”? In other words, we could be the best of what we saw on September 11, 2001, every day.

With a few exceptions, way too much of what I saw and heard and read yesterday failed to celebrate patriotism as much as it did fear and heartbreak and rage, a focus that’s already been exhausted daily for some time now.  To me, the real tragedy would be in waiting another 10 years to take another shot at doing it differently.