A Perfectly Acceptable Viewpoint.

Offered up in the NYT this morning by Dick Cavett:

Have you, perchance, decided — as I have — not to spend the weekend re-wallowing in 9/11 with the media? Aside from allowing Saint Rudolph, former tenant of Gracie Mansion, to trumpet once again his self-inflated heroism on that nightmare day, the worst feature of this relentlessly repeated carnival of bitter sights and memories is that it glamorizes the terrorists.

How they must enjoy tuning into our festival of their spectacular accomplishments, cheering when the second plane hits and high-fiving when the falling towers are given full-color international showcasing for the tenth time.

Who wants this? Surveys show people want to forget it, or at least not have it thrust down their throats from all over the dial annually. It can’t have to do with that nauseating buzz-word “closure.” There is no closure to great tragedies. Ask the woman on a call-in show who said how she resents all this ballyhooing every year of the worst day of her life: “My mother died there that day. I’m forced to go through her funeral again every year.”

Is all this stuff a ratings bonanza? Who in the media could be that heartless?

Tragedy porn pays...

Here's what one widow thinks:

"You go to the movies, it's 9/11. On TV, 9/11. Even when you want a break, you don't get a break," she said. "With the 10th anniversary, it's everywhere. It's everywhere."

When Osama bin Laden was killed, more calls came in. Some asked her about closure.

"Closure? There's no closure. My daughter's graduating and guess what? Her dad's not there," she said. "We just learn to live with it in a different way."
...
"People die every day. The difference is you're not seeing it over and over and over " she said in her new home, where the memories, if not the daily reminders, have followed her from New York.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Jake Cayne, a bond trader, was at his desk on the 104th floor of the north tower when the plane hit between the 93rd and 99th floors. No one above the 92nd floor could escape. He was 32.

And now the calls have started again.

Friends, family, reporters, newspapers, news stations - they all want to check in on Gina Cayne, now 40, as we near the 10th anniversary of day she lost her best friend, her first and only boyfriend, the father of her three daughters, the man she called her husband for nine years.

In 2006, she moved from the New Jersey town where everyone knows her as a 9/11 widow, from the house where she and Jake built memories. It's enough to ask yourself what could have been, she says. It's too much to see that question in the eyes of everyone you know and to have to answer it, in one way or another, every day of your life.

"Of course, there was no running from it," she said. "The memories come with me wherever I am."
...
But the pall of 9/11 never seemed to lift. Once, a family friend came across a memorial in a random small town with a picture of Jake and their oldest daughter, Suzann .

"That's a crazy feeling," she said. "We're a name on a wall now."

All in all you're just a...
another name on another black wall...

Personally, I think we hype this tragedy so much, instead of somberly remembering yet overcoming/moving on... so we can forget the 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians whose lives had just as much joy, triumph, and everyday promise as the 2,977 victims that were killed by terrorists that beautiful September day.

If life counts, if you truly believe on a human level that all men are created equal in the eyes of G-d, then we'd have to have a crude reckoning with that fact that our "justice" also snuffed out the lives of tens of thousands of other innocents, over there.

Obviously, we're not there yet.
Maybe when we're dealing with this as history, and less as contemporary politics, America can begin to grapple with what we ourselves have done in the opening decade of the 21st Century. So much carnage, and at so little cost seemingly. We didn't even bother to try and count the dead, their lives meant so little to us seemingly...

Of course, our ill-advised actions will come back to haunt us. The 2,977 will not rest in peace when so much killing was done in their name, instead of pin-pointedly precise justice.

To me, that's what separates the Israeli justice system* (or the form of justice so often practiced) from the United States: They believe in collective punishment. It's easier, on the ground.

Until our American ethics catch up to our technologies, until our American leaders care more about life than about ... "winning!", I suspect America will be hard-pressed to achieve greatness in world leadership once again. There's got to be more Christian balance in our Judeo-Christian values, but good luck selling that these days to the crowd in power... (not pacifism necessarily, but just wars, not just pre-emptive wars of choice)

Still, time passes and the old ways are ousted. But until the Cheney's of the world can admit their errors, as even Nixon was able to do

I regret deeply any injuries that may have been done in the course of the events that led to this decision. I would say only that if some of my judgments were wrong, and some were wrong, they were made in what I believed at the time to be the best interest of the Nation.

I fear we'll still be stuck in the same old spot, playing politics with human lives, and using September 11 to fulfill our own tragedy porn needs...

The victims -- those who died unnecessarily and prematurely -- all deserve better.

Fwiw.


-----------------

*That, and the fact that America has always been an open-arms, freedom-loving country that tries to treat citizens equally. None of this "these roads for you; these for your kind" these days, and there is simply no way our broad expansive country could ever lock up its borders content to live in a police security state, the way Israelis apparently understand they must, if they want to survive.

Nope. Not here. Never again.