I purposely didn’t blog anything about 9/11 yesterday. On past 9/11 anniversaries, I’ve sometimes blogged about it and sometimes not, but I think yesterday was the first time that I purposely refrained.
Yesterday felt like the most normal September 11 in a long time. We had our first chorus rehearsal of the season last night. At first, a few weeks ago, it was weird to see that our first rehearsal would be on September 11, 2007, and I wondered if that was appropriate. But then I thought, you know what? Enough. It’s just another day of the year. We shouldn’t be held hostage to the calendar.
Sure, I thought about the day at certain points. I recorded MSNBC in the morning, because it was rerunning the NBC TV coverage from that morning six years ago and I wanted to save it (which I’d meant to do when it was aired last year). And I thought about my friend Doug. And after work I returned a library book at the Jefferson Market branch on 6th Avenue and 10th Street, the same intersection where I first found out six years ago what was happening. It gave me a little shiver. And at night, from our apartment window, we could see the twin beams of light shining up from Lower Manhattan.
But I don’t know what I could have said yesterday that wouldn’t have been either mawkish or callous. While the New York Times and Washington Post websites gave top coverage to the Petraeus hearings, CNN.com’s main story yesterday morning said something like, “Six Years Later: We Remember.” That “we remember” that made me want to barf. The sentimentalization of it all. As in, if you don’t cry today, you’re not a good American. Just give us the news! Don’t try to tell us what we’re feeling.
Life continues.
Someone I read had a great analysis of the weird “holiday-ification” of this, which amounts to nothing more than a tragedy, one which now seems to be as patriotic as the 4th of July. It’s disturbing, truly. I also refrain from discussing 9/11 much anymore since my opinions of the whole thing (not conspiracy theories, mind you) are horribly out of the mainstream.
Over here in the UK, you can see the difference in attitudes and styles that our TV stations now have in marking the anniversary. Rather than the usual black and white slow-motion footage of the towers collapsing, we now have much more sober documentaries – such as how families have continued without those lost.
It’s all a little different to the 7th July, which was marked in one very moving ceremony a year afterwards, and has now been apparently forgotten.