Thursday, September 10, 2009

Nine Eleven no, No, NO!

Each year, as September 11th approaches, the air is filled with a kind of horrid nostalgia. It makes us all into self involved little automatons. Particularly idiotic are the suggestions that we build some sort of 9-11 Shrine or declare a National Holiday of it. The prospect makes me shudder. Here is why.

Some celebrations of national events ennoble and uplift participants. They bring us all into one space, one nation. Like the headlines on 9-11 itself, we gloried in "We are all Americans now." Other celebrations are like the organ recitals of the aged. What is otherwise to be an expected glitch of the flesh (say a slipped disc or a rectal lesion, a dimming eyesight or the inability to hear well) is dwelt on until it becomes a major identifying force. 9-11 would be one such debilitation. The celebration would take what is otherwise peripheral and make of it an obsession, an orgy of the put upon self. We do not need to magnify 9-11, letting it exert full force on us. We are quite injured enough already.

Theologians call the ennobling rituals, symbols and the demeaning ones, diabols. Symbols bring integrity and wholeness. Diabolical rites make of us petty and smaller than we might otherwise find ourselves to be. Several features of a proposed 9-11 holiday make it a sure fire diabol.

First, we are in the habit of thinking that we are different than everyone else on the globe. None of us will ever forget where we were on the morning of September 11, 2001, as scheduled airliners plunged first into the World Trade Center towers in New York, then into the Pentagon in Washington D.C. and finally into a barren field in rural Pennsylvania. The day is memorable. But it is not notable. Here is why. What made it seem consequential was the sheer surprise of it. We want to magnify the sheer number of souls lost. But held up next to the annual carnage on the nation's highways, the death toll was rather small (by a factor of 10). And if we measure death against the war deaths we ourselve have inflicted on others, say in Dresden or Hiroshima, the death toll of 9-11 is minuscule, by as much as a factor of several hundred. Terror did happen to us, but not in near the volume we ourselves allow. Such a holiday would only underscore our gross exaggeration of our self importance or worse, our overreaction in 2 full scale, ill advised and long duration wars. We do not want to spend too much time dwelling on that, I would not think.

Further, such a celebration is vulnerable to the worst of our patriarchal excess. We probably need a holiday to celebrate public servants, the police and fire personnel who, like troopers, put their lives in danger on behalf of others. It happened to be true in those days, that those who responded to the tragedy were men, family men most of them. We grieve their loss. We look for heroes. It is but an opening to relish in a confusing past of a man's world. Today, those who respond to our public tragedies may be family men, but they are also women, gays and lesbians. The temptation is to use the responders of that one holiday to imprint a generation with patriarchy. There is at least as much danger in a gay couple trying to live "out" with integrity. Single mothers who face overstacked odds have a bravery worthy of the 9-11 first responders. We have quite enough trouble trying to get our Boy Scouts to face the world as it is, a world made up of men, women, gays and straights. No need to pile on yet another stack of fraternal orders to confuse, or worse, to derail the progress we are making.

In the end, we need for a holy balance. We came to 9-11, 2001 in near total ignorance of any other holy group on the planet, save for the occasional Jew. The "we're number one" crowd looks for a chance to spread the deception of the US as a so called Christian Nation, in contrast to the terrorists we so easily identify with Islam. Jews, Baha'is, Hindus, Muslims, animists and a host of other persuasions have shared this planet with the righteous for a long time. They threaten to share it for a good long time to come. We are not well served by fooling ourselves into thinking that 9-11 was the opening volley in some holy war or other. We would do well to try to find out the righteousness of others on the holy days that we already have available. (Ramadan, anyone?)

We have managed to twist a goodly number of national holidays to the service of our meanest desires. I see no reason to drag gender and faith into the mix. We might better take the time we might have celebrated 9-11 to figure out how we are going to get meaningful holy days back from the ones we have already lost to a variety of interests. Veteran's Day or Pearl Harbor Day or Memorial Day or Armed Forces Day or Thanksgiving or Independence Day or Mother's Day, each has departed from its original shape so profoundly that it is but a diabolical wart on the nation's hide. Only the insanely curious can tell you what gave rise to these holidays in the first place! They have been co-opted by special interests. We would do well to get them back.

We simply do not need another day to dwell on ourselves with such magnificent obsession. So use September 11th as a day to get at what you usually do on such a day! But please, no holiday.

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