9/11

I won't write about this tomorrow, but I will write about it today.

September 11, 2001. Approximately 2,998 U.S. civilians (mostly civilians) dead or missing on American soil, due to an unprecedented and cowardly act of terrorism. It is a great pity that a nation that prides itself on being one of the strongest in the world had it's citzenry overcome with boxcutters and knives. As we have all said subsequently, and I think, uniformly: do it again, and this time you will be the one dying and we will be the ones who live. Cultural memory is an interesting thing: I have done nothing to anyone who belives in Islam. No one who believes in Islam has done anything to effect me personally. Therefore, I fail to understand the absolute rabid fundamentalist hatred they have toward us, and must boil the hatred to it's simplest argument - you end up hating what you covet the most.

I am normally a non violent person. However, when I watched people who made the concious decision to plunge to their deaths rather than burn to death, I became violent. How dare you conspire to murder perfectly innocent human beings based on their nationality? Had any of them stood in front of me, I would have willingly killed them myself.

However, death in itself does not change a culture, does not alter a people's religious belief's. If you kill the father, the son grows up with more hatred in his heart than the father had. What, then, is the solution? One cannot, in good conscience, eradicate a people.

I went to the site of the Towers in 2003. Without a doubt, the eeriest and most haunting experience ever, with it's fence covered in photos of the missing and the dead, and the remnants of wreaths and floral arrangements scattering amid the ash in the wind. I stood there, with my fingers through the chain link, and I was fucking angry.

September 11, 1971. The date of my parent's marriage, at the First United Methodist Church in East Point, GA. My parents have now been married thirty six years (btw, my parents NEVER have remembered their anniversary), and have the dubious distinction of having the date of their anniversary be the date of one of the most heinous crimes in contemporary history. I think, in fact, that the best thing any of us could do as Americans would be to schedule any important event on this date (as much as we could; bris's, bar mitzvah's, baptisms, christenings, births, weddings, engagement parties, divorces..well..maybe not divorces). Anything that was life affirming or celebratory in nature. We are still here. We still live on. We still have spirit. Our economy is not ruined (discounting the housing debacle). We are not oppressed. We are not destroyed. And...we are still angry. And we will never forget those who died.