Left In Lowell

A.J. on AMERICAblog has it exactly right:

A day robbed of its rightful meaning

It’s impossible to appropriately comment on a day like today.

One wants to think about this day differently, somehow, despite the fact that its impact and effects confront us endlessly. One wants to be able to think about this date, this anniversary, without partisan overtones and instead with recognition of the shared experience. The collective response to an appalling attack had such potential, such meaning for who we are as individuals and as a nation.

Today it’s an arrow in political quivers.

Pain and suffering can beget pain and suffering, even when so many of us work to make it otherwise.

So we work harder, and do more, and maintain the notion that this is a day for all Americans. One to be remembered simply for loss, even in the midst of all other factors. Just loss.

The words “September the 11th” have been washed of any meaning of simple remembrance of those lost, so often has it been used, abused, and substituted for justification in cynical political acts like a war we were lied into or civil liberties we are told we have to give away. In speeches for six years, we have been told that September the 11th changed everything. It certainly has. It has taken a national tragedy and made it hard to see for what it is at its core - human pain and suffering and the center of a national communal outpouring of grief, togetherness, and yes, strength.

September the 11th should have raised the United States to its greatest hour. Instead, we are forced now to add mourning for our own additional dead, and vaguely aware of so many more deaths…families like ours, in another country across a great ocean, whose losses are largely uncounted by the American public. Suffering we have perpetrated on the world, yet again.

It didn’t have to be this way. Today, let’s try to remember September the 11th the way we should, and not the way they want us to…as a day the world stood still, the towers came crashing down, and we held hands, and hugged…and cried.