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Thursday, September 11, 2008

And so the annual orgy of grief takes place once again
Posted by Jill | 7:21 AM
It almost seems as if we enjoy this, this annual celebration of grief and horror and fear and terror. We know that Republicans enjoy it; they made a lovely pornographic snuff film about it to show at their convention, one which tacked on the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis at the beginning, just to lay the groundwork for the attack on Iran for which they lust. But what about the rest of us?

It is now seven years on, and all over the country, people and politicians are going to glom onto the memories of the 9/11 attacks, reliving the images and watching the television specials. Next thing you know, and it's already been rumbled in some quarters, someone will want to declare it a national holiday and you'll have all Dockers 40% off at Kohl's in "celebration" of 9/11 Day.

I was fortunate. I didn't lose anyone that day. Mr. Brilliant came into LaGuardia that morning on a flight from North Carolina on one of the last flights allowed into the New York area before the planes hit the towers. He'd been held up the night before due to a severe thunderstorm. I didn't lose any relatives, friends, or even people I used to know. A neighbor wasn't so lucky. She lost her husband. She has since moved, and her daughter lives in the house now with HER husband. I don't know them well, but every year I wonder how they feel about these memorials. There is another family in the area that I do know about because a friend knows them. They have spent the last seven years wearing flag pins and supporting George W. Bush (which I suspect they would have done anyway) and trying to comfort themselves with the notion that their son died a hero because he was sitting at his desk working while an airplane flew into his office building and the President they support sat in a third-grade classroom doing nothing.

I can't imagine what it must be like to watch your husband, son, father, brother, wife, mother, daughter, or friend die on national television in a spectacle that is replayed over and over and over again. I can't imagine what it's like to have the event in which your loss took place used to justify some of the worst atrocities ever committed by this country's leadership. I can't imagine what it's like to flip through your cable provider's program guide during this week every year and see one program after another on "how the towers fell", or movies in which actors who get to go home to their families portray people who died. Real people. YOUR people.

I know that there has been much controversy at the idea of terminating the practice of reading the names at Ground Zero every year. I can't imagine what it would be like to place importance on burial of one's remains and have to live every day knowing that YOUR loved one's remains are out in the unfortunately-named Fresh Kills landfill. It's no wonder that these families work so hard to keep the memory alive, to make sure that people know the faces and stories of these people who had children and families and hobbies and gardens and who loved the Yankees or Mets and puttering in the workshop on Saturdays and making Christmas cookies. It's no wonder the wounds are still so raw. Our government and our culture demands that they remain raw forever. It's in their interest that those wounds remain raw, in order to justify endless war and blockbuster movies.

I wonder if some of them resent this annual orgy of grief, held at their expense, by people in many places where the likelihood of being struck by lightning or wiped out hitting a deer on the road or dying from a gunshot in a bar fight or being killed in a tornado is greater than the likelihood of terrorists coming to their towns. I wonder if the idea of these observances is a comfort to the bereaved, or if it comes across by this late date as an attempt to be a part of something that can only be truly understood by those who have had to live with the immediate consequences every single day for the last seven years.

I have a friend who lost a daughter a couple of years ago. I remember someone we worked with saying that you never get over a loss like this, but you find a place for it. I always envisioned that place being like a room in your mind, where you go to visit the lost person every now and then. You know that person can't accompany you out of that room and that you have to live without that person except when you go into that room. Some people make that room literal when they leave the person's bedroom or office or workshop just as that person left it. You find a place. You find a place because the person is part of your heart and your soul and to not have that place is to cut a chunk out of your own being.

None of us expects to lose someone quickly and senselessly, and yet it happens every day. Car accidents. Stray bullets. A mugging gone bad. But when it happens so spectacularly, on national television, with many souls leaving us at the same time, and when the event is used as a political football for seven straight years, how do you find a place for it? How do you find a place when at every opportunity, politicians insist on not only going into that room with you, but on dragging your loved one out of it into the real world to use in a photo-op?

I realize that grief is an individual and private thing. But I wonder if the relentless invocation by Republicans of the 9/11 attacks, the trademarking of the event (as Keith Olbermann put it last night), is doing these families a disservice by insisting that their grief be kept raw in perpeutity for the political gain of Republicans. And I wonder if Americans' insistence that this is an event that affected all of us somehow cavalierly dismisses the very real hole in the lives of those families who actually WERE affected.

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5 Comments:
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Classy.
9/11/08, 8:22 AM  
Blogger Teacher Mom said...
Well said, B@B. I recently discovered your blog and I am so glad. It's like you are parroting my thoughts, except you are far more eloquent! THANK you for contributing to our society. That may sound corny, but voices like yours are important.
9/11/08, 8:50 AM  
Blogger Lisa said...
Beautifully said. Thank you for saying what I think needs to be said out loud.
9/11/08, 8:51 AM  
Blogger Jayhawk said...
I may not be saying this right. I may be saying it in far too blunt a manner. I don't know quite how else to say it. We are picking at the scab. We will not let it heal. The scab is there for a reason, and if we acknowledge it but leave it alone and live with it then whatever healing can occur, will occur. When we keep pulling the scab off, the wound remains an open, raw and needlessly painful wound.
9/11/08, 11:29 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
What turned me off (and I lived in NJ right across the river and watched the towers be built and my significant other worked there before we moved) was the whole compensation issue. Why them? There have been so many who have suffered, too many to name, but what about those held hostage in Iran? The Cole victims? The 4000 men/women who died in Iraq? You get the idea..

And another thing: if BushCheney are so i sure Iraq had something to do with this, why didn't they use Iraq's oil money to pay the compensation?

And the irony of how much is reported that the mid USA hates NYC;.remember the headline about NYC dropping dead when it was in poor fiscal health? Hypocrites as usual.

This day is used not to remember but to reap fear- IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU!!!!!!!!

AAARRRGGGHHH
9/11/08, 11:43 AM  
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