9/11

How are you observing 9/11, asks CNN.com. I guess the assumption that it's still a day of wailing, sobbing, self pity and recreational anger is still with us.

Perhaps like 12/7 or an endless host of infamous dates, 9/11/01 will continue to live in infamy amongst a dwindling number of old men for a while, but eventually become one with the date on which the battleship Maine sank (2/15) and itself sink into irrelevance to anyone but historians. 4/19, the date on which a right-wing Christian terrorist blew up the Murrah Federal building, has long disappeared from the list of American passion plays.

We're no longer, for the most part, bombarded with daily warnings of mysterious Internet "chatter" and mysterious unattributed warnings or "terror," and fear of invasion by bearded, dark skinned maniacs isn't rampant in the streets of small town America.

To me it's a day. It's a Thursday which means my wife volunteers at the Red Cross and I pay bills, take out the garbage and do chores. Yes, I will be thankful nothing fell on my son and I do remember an old acquaintance who didn't make it out alive, but I'm not going to follow the many e-mail suggestions to put flags on my car, or have moments of silence or forward messages to everyone I know. I'm not going to help inflame more anger or self-pity or any of those things George Bush used to get us to support a bogus war during the first day of which more innocents were killed than died in New York.

I'd rather remember that Osama bin Laden is still unaccounted for, that "the troops" we're supposed to support are being let down by the government who sent them overseas under false pretenses, false assumptions, without proper reinforcements, with insufficient planning and resources. I'd rather remember, if I must remember something today, that this country seems poised to refuse to learn a simple lesson and put people of the same mindset and even less integrity into office to replace him.

I have no way of knowing whether my grandchildren will still be "observing" 9/11 when they are my age, or even if they will have any idea of what happened subsequently. Their ideas of history may very well be wildly different from my ideas about current events. A lot of that depends on what happens on 10/4 of this year. Will it signal a return to sanity, to the basic principles of secular, liberal democracy, or will I be observing it in the coming years from the Windward Islands?