9/11, Never FOrget@!!!1!derf!!!
How can anyone possibly forget. It gets crammed down our throats on a yearly basis. Buy why shouldn't it be. The news outlets deserve a free day (freedom day?) for rehashing the past for quick and painless ratings galore. And there's still plenty of money to be milked out of a decade-old tragedy. T-shirts, flag stickers, freedom burgers, etc... And surely nothing you do on a daily basis can prove that you are American or "patriotic" quite like rekindling an "us vs them" tragedy. It unifies, after all. Much in the same way being a fan of a particular sports team unifies you against all those other people who like that other sports team. Life is so much easier to digest when simplified down to the most basic components of black and white or good and evil.
Never Forget. Because obviously anyone who was cognizant during that time is going to forget that event having transpired. NOBODY is going to forget where they were or what they were doing on that day. I understand that it's a catchy little piece of sloganeering, but it's akin to telling somebody to never forget they got raped once. You don't tell rape victims to remember they got raped on a yearly basis do you? If you do, maybe you should stop doing that.
Do we really have it that easy in the U.S. these days that we have to commemorate 9/11 on a yearly basis while natural disasters wipe out tens of thousands in other countries on a yearly basis? Most other countries would have paid their repects, rebuilt and moved on long ago. I guess if the most strife you have to endure on a daily basis is getting the occasional parking ticket or catching a cold every now and again, then 9/11 is a wound that is worth constantly reopening. Because not forgetting 9/11 is obviously making us safer and/or assuring that it won't happen again.
The thing is, it WILL happen again in some form or another, whether you remember 9/11 or not. This isn't Peter Pan, where believing (or remembering) hard enough will result in some desired effect occurring or not occurring. As long as people in positions of power in this country screw over and engage in shady dealings (i.e. selling weapons) with other countries, other countries will have reason to get even. (Other than obviously hating our freedom of course.) Unfortunately it's the citizens who end up paying, and not the people in positions of power. Your being groped at the airport isn't doing much to delay the inevitable. The root of the problem isn't addressed, and so the cycle continues unfortunately.
I also like when people play the perseverance/overcoming adversity card. You are still dwelling on the event 10 years later and haven't moved on with your life. How exactly is that persevering? You live in fear and have had your way of life altered. Persevering would have been taking the necessary time (9 years at most) to grieve and clean up, then going about your life like the terrorist attacks were nothing more than a minor inconvenience. A small group of individuals affected your life in such a way that you need to revisit it on a yearly occasion. You also need to have your penis and/or bewbs 3D rendered before boarding a plane. In effect, you haven't persevered by any definition of the word. You're acting like a 15-year-old who broke up with a girlfriend and is still dwelling on it instead of finding someone new. On top of it all, you were indefinitely grounded by your parents for something you didn't even do.
In conclusion. Let's shoot off some fireworks for the milestone we've all worked so hard to reach by not letting someone else win at something completely intangible and abstract that they may or may not have actually won at, and bury it once and for all. Let's not have any 11th year festivities. There doesn't need to be a 25th year silver anniversary edtion. Put the political agendas aside and get the rest of the troops out of the Middle East. Don't try to screw them over on the benefits while you're at it. Then let's get to work on cleaning up the mess that's right here in the now.
And also, if you can put aside the nationalistic self-absorption for a while, how's about not forgetting all these other people who have died since 2001. It takes the same 14 seconds to remember that you're putting in right now. I know not all of them are the same color as you, or speak the same language, but are people nonetheless.
Jan '01 Indian earthquake - 20,000 people RIP.
Aug '03 European heatwave - 40,000 people RIP.
Dec '03 Iranian earthquake - 26,000 people RIP.
Dec '04 Indian Ocean earthquake - 250,000 people RIP.
May '06 Indonesian earthquake - 6000 people RIP.
May '08 Burmese cyclone - 22,000 people RIP.
May '08 Chinese earthquake - 70,000 people RIP.
Jan '10 Haiti earthquake - 316,000 people RIP.
Mar '11 Japanese tsunami - 16,000 people RIP.
(That's 3/4 of a million people you could also be never forgetting)
FREE BONUS PARAGRAPH!
Hey there! This paragraph didn't quite fit the flow of this educational bulletin, and perhaps wasn't that well composed, but here it is anyways, because I didn't have the heart to destroy it like the terrorist tried to destroy our freedom. Enjoy!
If 3000 people had been killed in a natural disaster on that day, we would have moved on long ago. About 2/3 as many people died from Hurricane Katrina, yet that tragedy doesn't get rehashed on nearly the scale 9/11 does. Maybe we really haven't progressed all that much from the 1800's, and in our reality, each person who died during Katrina is only equivalent to 3/5 of each person who died during 9/11. By that count only a little over 1000 people died in Katrina. That number still seems a little too high though. Since most were poor and not Gucci-wearing, Latte-sipping Americans like the rest of us, lets knock off another 2/5 per person. So... it appears only 367.2 people died. That doesn't seem so bad. Surely not worth dwelling on. They weren't even taken out by a plane. Michael Bay couldn't even make a movie about that. Nothing to see here, let's move on.
