I mentioned it once or twice, but I think I got away with it. But now, we need to let the healing begin and just move on:
The second anniversary of the September 11 attacks this week looks set to be a low-key affair, reflecting a partial healing of wounds inflicted by the trauma and a switch in focus caused by the war in Iraq.
Short-term thinking and subzero sum partisanship are endemic to our culture, hence headlines like this:
For 7 Days in Iraq, No U.S. Combat Deaths
But where are the headlines that read like this:
For 129 Days in Iraq, No Iraqi's Tortured for Reasons Known Only to Uday Hussein
For 129 Days in Iraq, No Daughters and Wives Raped for Iraqi's Political Beliefs
For 129 Days in Iraq, No Entire Iraqi Families Murdered Because Someone Opposed Saddam Hussein
For 129 Days in Iraq, No More Children's Prisons
For 129 Days In Iraq, No More Mass Graves
Of course, some Iraqis have been killed and wounded in countless small engagements and actions as well in the larger scale terrorist attacks at the Imam Ali Mosque and at the UN Headquarters in Iraq. But these terrorist attacks were a desperate, smaller scale, more generic kind of terror than the personal brand of terrorism inflicted on the people of Iraq by Saddam, Uday, and Qusay on a regular basis. And that, my friends, has come to a complete stop. But that's not front page news, I guess.
As a kid, I can remember being taught that December 7, 1941, was a day that would live in infamy -- and that was some 30 years after the event. Now, only two years after 9/11, some want us to just get over it already. Sorry, but I'm still in the mood for remembrance and righteous anger. The therapeutic approach proffered by Big Media and Big Education to the acts of war committed against the US have me wondering what my grandkids will be taught in school in another 30 years about 9/11, and about December 7, 1941, for that matter.