I don’t want to call it a crisis of faith, but I’m having an internal struggle today and I blame The Onion. It’s not because they wrote a news story that some people thought was true, driving them into a ridiculous frenzy that makes me want to cry. No, in this case, it reflects a viewpoint that a lot of people reading this blog entry might not appreciate. The article is called “18-Year-Old Fighting In Afghanistan Has 9/11 Explained To Him By Older Soldier.”
Today is the 11th anniversary of the collapse of the Twin Towers. I remember standing in front of a TV and watched an airplane collide with the second tower in a giant ball of fire, then the first tower started to collapse as I rushed out of the room to go to class. I’ve written about it on here before. How I let a few tears trickle down my cheeks to mourn the victims’ loss, both those in the buildings and their loved ones. How I felt that Americans should consider today our day instead of a day that terrorists took from us.
Today is the 11th anniversary of the collapse of the Twin Towers. We’ve invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and God knows how many other regions in the Middle East since then. And if anyone wants to try to convince me that we went in specifically to “liberate” those people, save your breath—if not for the terrorist attacks here in the U.S., the number of American troops whose feet touched those sands would be microscopic in comparison. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate the sacrifices they’ve made, but I refuse to accept bullshit reasoning for our being there.
Today is the 11th anniversary of the collapse of the Twin Towers. We have troops stationed overseas who were in 1st grade when it happened. Do they fully grasp the significance of today’s date? Can they?
- Veterans Day is November 11th: in 1918, the Allied forces signed a cease-fire treaty with Germany to end World War I.
- Pearl Harbor Day is December 7th: in 1941, Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor. Four days later, we declared war on Germany and became firmly entrenched in World War II.
- Patriot Day is September 11th: in 2001, terrorists hijacked four passenger airplanes in flight and used them to destroy the Twin Towers and thousands of lives.
In an age where social media enables people to express their views throughout the Internet whether you want them to or not, 9/11 leads to an enormous number of Twitter posts and a multitude of status messages, flags and “Never Forget” pictures on Facebook. Veterans Day and Pearl Harbor Day? Almost nothing.
Most people who use Twitter and Facebook weren’t alive when those first two events occurred, so maybe that’s why they don’t fully appreciate them: “Never Forget” doesn’t apply when you never learned in the first place. That’s why I wonder how long it’ll be before September 11th becomes “just another day when the flag is lowered to half-mast.”
Further complicating the matter is the forgotten scale of those earlier events.
2,752 people were killed on 9/11, but in WWI, 37 **MILLION** people died worldwide and in WWII, *60* million. Half a million Americans died in the Civil War and we don’t even have a day that no one remembers to honor them.
For as much as 9/11 hurts our country and our world, I can’t even imagine living through an era of 28 years (equiv to 1985 to today) in which nearly 100 million people were killed as a result of war.
If we can’t manage to grasp the scale of that and “remember” it a mere 67 years after it ended, I fear nothing *can* be remembered properly as a society.
F*** The Onion and anything they say. I was a fan before but not now. Did you see their twitter tagline of #11FuckingYearsAgoChrist? It is so incredibly heartless, it makes me sick. Why don’t we celebrate the fourth of July with #236fuckingyearsago? It’s the holiday. It’s what we do. We REMEMBER and RESPECT. Those bastards would have been castrated if they had posted it even five years ago, and the same number of lives were lost on Sept 11 2001 as this year. My MOTHER died that day, so f*** anyone who tells me it should be less painful now than it was then.