I belong to the blank generation

[sovay]

I don't know how to write about the tenth anniversary of 9/11. All we ever have of the dead are our memories and what we do with them; and these dead were so swiftly turned to propaganda, it seemed impossible to grieve them without becoming part of the national myth that hung out flags everywhere and wanted to see itself as the second coming of World War II. The trauma became a photo-op. It honored neither the living or the dead. And I don't want to see them lost to Iraq, Afghanistan, the TSA; they deserved to be mourned for themselves, not because they were wounded America. I can't light candles for them. None of them were my dead: I have no part in that grief. Ten years ago I sang "Amazing Grace" in a classroom. All I think I can do now is say their memory for a blessing, because once they were alive; and our memories, that we might use them better from now on.

Comments

[timesygn.livejournal.com]

Yes. I evinced a similar sentiment in my own anniversablog. "The trauma became a photo-op." And a sled to run on the ice in our veins. Perhaps it's thawed by now.

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm with you on this.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Sadly, yes.

Coming back from abroad, I saw the change all at once--the flags and the fervor--and my heart sank.

Nine

[greygirlbeast.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

That describes it well.

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

You're having the same problem we were, and which prompted the family media blackout. (Of course, there was just as much Poignant!!!!! in the commuter paper this morning, JFC...)

I wish I had a God for such cynical times...

It's not that my memories of that day aren't perfectly clear; it's that we should have used the weight of all that memory to go forward and do something better. Better and less jackbooty.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

The only thing that ever helped me were the little individual tributes. Roses on street corners, an unexpected band playing a horn serenade when I came out of the subway at dusk, postcards on a fence, and a friend going around with a tape recorder trying to record Mike Ford's 110 Stories with authentic New York street noise in the background by holding the recorder up to the faces of people unexpectedly and asking them to speak a line the way they would talk to a friend.

All our dead are hallowed, that these dead have been held up as martyrs so much and for so long can't be healthy for their families or by extension, the public that is forced to watch their mourning process. I'm with you, let the dead rest, and let's focus on bringing the living back to life.

[clarionj.livejournal.com]

Thank you. You've expressed what I was feeling, and I didn't know how to say.

[shirei-shibolim.livejournal.com]

Thank you for writing this. It's what I spent a lot of the day being too irritated to say.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Two things help me, fwiw: Mike Ford's 110 Stories (http://nielsenhayden.com/110.html), and holding doggedly to remembering the other anniversary (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm) that we would do well not to forget on this day.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Very well said.