Yesterday’s Thomas Friedman Op Ed says it extremely well.
“I want a president who can one day restore Sept. 11th to its rightful place on the calendar: as the day after Sept. 10th and before Sept. 12th. I do not want it to become a day that defines us. Because ultimately Sept. 11th is about them - the bad guys - not about us. We’re about the Fourth of July.”
We should not be defined by what we oppose. America has always had higher, better aspirations than that.
Comments 2
I view September 11th as a day of remembrance for Americans who lost their lives and Americans who fought to save their fellowman. In our community September 11th has become associated with giving, offering service to others. To me that is a good fruit that has come from a very sad occurrence. If September 11th defines us at all in the way we remember it, then it defines us as a people who will rise above acts of cruelty and have good in our hearts and a people who will remember with honor those whose lives were taken in the name of our country.
Posted 19 Oct 2004 at 11:44 am ¶Hi Stacy,
First off let me thank you for sharing what are clearly views near to your heart. I want to be clear that my point of view was not disparaging in any way the heroic efforts of those who experienced September 11th first-hand, nor those that lost their lives in the tragedy. I remember the day well because my Aunt in Chelsea, NYC lives near the Trade Center area, and much of my family is located across the Hudson in NJ and frequents New York City. Thankfully none of them were harmed.
The “meaning” of September 11th is currently contested in this country, because it is so fresh in our history. Your meaning honors the day and shows it as an occasion that transcends the tragedy to offer hope and show the goodness in what it means to be an American. It is in that sense “sacred.” I hope your version wins. Others have used the occasion politically as short-hand for revenge and retribution, as a way of necessarily sacrificing our civil liberties and launching preemptive war, they argue, because it has changed the very meaning of who and what Americans are in the world.
It is in this sense that Friedman (and I) argue that July 4th is what America is about.
I am reminded in your comments of something the author, pacifist and humanitarian Kurt Vonnegut said about Armistice Day, the day of his birth. It requires a close reading, because it is easy to misunderstand his conclusion about what is “sacred” as opposed to honored, remembered and respected. Vonnegut is writing about what was lost - an innocence and hope that was lost. I have read a lot of Vonnegut’s work - his point is not to disparage the individual military service and sacrifice of those fighting after WW I (which includes Vonnegut’s own service in battles in WW II, when he became a German POW). Vonnegut’s point is that the wars after WW I represent a collective failure of humanity, an inability to abandon the horrors of war for the promise and humanity of peace, and in that way the later wars represent a loss of the “sacred.” He writes:
“I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one and another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ day is not.”
Losing Armistice Day was not only the loss of the “sacred” - it has meant the loss of millions of lives to war. Let us hope that September 11th can become sacred in the way Armistice Day once was - embracing hope from horror, life from death.
Posted 20 Oct 2004 at 1:14 am ¶Post a Comment