9/11

So I want to know: at what point do all these 9/11 "tributes" and "commemorations" stop becoming emotional and important, and start becoming just a cultish, nationalistic endeavor meant to chain us to a past that we have, on the day to day level, forgotten?

9/11 changed nothing. It didn't give us right to have the foreign policy we've had or to invade a soverign country in the search for weapons and connections that were never there. The families of the firefighters have been used as political pawns, although they themselves have purveyed that by believeing that because a family member of theirs died in the disaster, it lent any more credibility to their political opinion. It tore the fabric of the nation apart, and we have not recovered. The divide between red and blue is still huge, with great masses of people having lost all faith in the electorate that promised to protect them, but failed.

Yes, the whole thing still bothers me. It likely always will. I grew up in the shadow of those towers, and when I look out over the gleaming lights of the Hudson and see the towers that aren't there, it will always strike me as strange. It still, in my eyes, robs the NYC skyline of the mystique and power that it once had.

I hope America is bottoming out. I hope our economy is at it's lowest point, and that we have learned that the pen is mightier than the sword... and it spills much less blood. Why? Because I'm tired of commemorations. These people, New Yorkers, have moved on. The women are remarried, the children call other people "dad". Let us move on. The damage is done, and if it hasn't healed by now, it's not going to. And no fucking memorial service with flag draped balconies and eloquent speeches is going to change that.