I find myself torn today between commemorating the anniversary of a horrific attack and giving in to my cynical side. The cynical side is winning. I can't help but look at all the TV and internet coverage and wonder if we aren't missing the point, of if we aren't simply giving ourselves over to grieving instead of moving on. This is not to say, of course, that this isn't a horrible tragedy whose victims shouldn't be mourned. I just don't know if I feel comfortable or even honest in taking part in it because, truthfully, the immediate impacts of the events didn't touch me at all. I felt shock, horror, and disgust watching first the footage of the planes hitting the buildings, and then again when the two towers crumbled, just like every other normal human with feelings and emotions. It was emotional and frightening. But no one I knew was affected directly - no one I knew lost a life, and no one I knew lost someone they knew. Of course, the usual qualifiers apply: someone out there did lose their loved ones, and for them, this day should be something important. And it is important for all of us who were alive and aware on this day in 2001. But the fact remains that we can't keep focusing on this day or we'll never move on.
I don't like seeing an event like this turned into a media spectacle. Cynical me looks at the news stories and sees only the strings of hearts everywhere being plucked - there's the footage of the second plane hitting the tower, again; there's the first tower disappearing in a cloud of dust, again; there's the other tower sinking from the New York skyline, again; and yes, they trotted out the very thing I hoped they wouldn't: the children. Just when you thought they couldn't find something else to poke at bruised, tender memories, they bring out the children of those lost that day to read a list of the names of their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and friends. And it's just cruel. It's cruel to these children to force them through these memories again, in public, on TV, in front of the world, as if they don't wake up every morning and go to sleep every night wishing their daddy or mommy were there to tuck them in. No, they bring them down to the very site where their family members took their last breaths, or their desperate last leaps from the flaming buildings, and they parade them before the press and make them look at the giant hole where their loved ones died. They're breathing the air filled with dust kicked up by their little feet, and some of them might even realize that in that dust are the ashes of their kin. All just to say their names out, as if to somehow make this tragedy mean just that much more to you than it did that day two years ago.
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