By The Way...

Two years to the day after the 9/11 attacks, it's perfectly natural that some people (here and here, for example) question the need to come back to the event and to spend part of the day looking at it:

What they really mean is not "remember," but dwell. Obsess. Lingeringly finger the scab. And most of all, fall in line when assured that some grand policy, however wise or unwise, is put forth in the name of that day and the atrocities that marked it.

I do agree that remembering 9/11 should not be a tool to send us back into the state of fear, shock and loss we felt on that morning two years ago. I also agree that remembering 9/11 is not the same as abandoning one's good sense about political policy, especially after two years an all that's come in that arena since then. We're not the same people and country we were when we were struck. In some ways were better, in some ways worse, but in all cases we are who we are today. We can't and shouldn't retreat from where we stand, nor forget what we've learned or come to believe in these two years.

Remembrance is something else, however. I think it's right to take the time on this day to remember what happened, to whom it happened, and and for what reasons it happened. And it's worth remembering that the 3,000 people who died in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, each individuals, also represented all of us -- to those who committed the attacks, the lives of those people were interchangable with the lives of any one of us. It's why 9/11 resonates so strongly with us, why so many Americans feel grief for those they never knew in life. In remembering them, we're remembering not only that it could have been us in the planes, in the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center. It was us.

Dwell? No. Life moves on. But remember.

|  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this