Lest We Forget

For some reason, people in my hometown think that a good response to the tragedy of 9/11 is a carnival. I kid you not. There have been radio advertisements going out for the past three weeks, inviting all of us to a massive cookout with games for the kids that, somehow, helps us all to remember 9/11 and what occurred there.

Somehow.

America, you make no sense.

Of course, it's also the nation that responded to the deaths of 3,000 with the retributive killings of nearly a million, who invaded two countries because of it, ruining infrastructure and governments and sweeping them aside as "justifiable risk" and "collateral damage" because it's the Superpower of the Ages and are allowed to. It seems to me that, in the face of great tragedies, Americans en masse lose all power to think clearly, and since we lived in the Wild West era for too long, our lack of thinking skills translate to pulling out guns.

And so our country's ultimate memorial to our tragedy is causing more tragedy. In an attempt to "never forget", we've forgotten what it feels like to have your country attacked and people snatched away prematurely, to the point where we dismiss other countries' concerns about the deaths of their people.

So I suppose what I'm trying to say is: we don't have to forget what happened. That would be unnatural, and pretty cold. Because people did die, and lives are still being affected by that. But let's not remember so hard that we start sending more bombs places and justifying it because, in the logic of the playground, "they hit us first".