As the media coverage of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy has been all over the news this past week, I'm forced to believe that Americans, as horrible as it was and as horrible as it is to say so, would rather think about the terrorist attacks of 2001 than all that has happened since that day.
When put into context of the decade that it started, the tragic day of September 11, 2001, is, if anything, the least unpleasant event that has captured the United States as a whole.
Think about it. The Iraq War is still ongoing. The "other" war in Afghanistan was started and still continues. 6,200 US troops have been killed in those two Middle Eastern actions with no foreseeable end. The worldwide financial collapse. The, now nonexistent, housing market. 14 million Americans are out of work. America's declining household income. The arrival of China as a global superpower. The United States' debt burden. Hurricane Katrina. The Gulf oil spill. The unchecked change in climate and the denial of its importance. The political partisan bickering that puts winning elections over the public good. Nuclear proliferation.
I don't want to trivialize the pain and suffering that those misguided individuals caused when they flew those jetliners into the heart of America's psyche. People died, and parents lost children, siblings lost brothers and sisters, children grew up with a parent who is but a picture in a frame.
Because of that shared tragedy, the nation came together, at least for a few days. Americans seemed to bond together in shared sorrow and determination. For a few days, there were no hyphenated Americans, no Irish, Italian, Native, Afro, Asian or Latin before the term American. People seemed to care for each other.
Now, Americans have less freedom, less mobility, less security, less faith in their institutions and way of life. Once secure in their belief in the American persona, the American Dream has become a nightmare of fear and uncertainty.
Remembering 9/11 as some kind of Day That The Music Died is the tragedy because what Americans are actually longing for is a return to those "better days" of that shared national agony in September 2001, when everybody truly believed things couldn't get any worse.
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