Retrospective

[jhetley]

(Warning -- risk of offense ahead)

I have to agree with starcat_jewel that the 9/11 National Day of Pathos (Bathos?) has started to outwear its welcome.  And moved into the realm of political manipulation.

Even private mourning should have an end.  Wife's parents recently attended the ceremony of placing a stone on the grave of an old friend, Jewish custom, a year after burial.  That serves as a public end of mourning, the point at which the living should move on with life.

Caught a snip of some politician somewhere yammering on about enemies who will stop at nothing in their rage to hurt us, and how we will stop at nothing in our fight against them.  That's only partially paraphrased -- the "stop at nothing" is verbatim. 

"Stop at nothing" gives us Abu Ghraib.  History says "stop at nothing" gives us  the SS executing a hundred hostages for each Wehrmacht soldier killed by the Resistance...

Comments

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Great. 9/11 as Guy Fawkes Day: in 200 years, are we going to be burning effigies of Osama Bin Laden with not a single person in the crowd remembering what actually happened on that day? (Sorry: in some ways, the remembrance of Gunpowder Treason was the reason why I was born in the US instead of the UK, as it got pulled up every few years in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries as an excuse for anti-Catholic hooliganism. My great-grandparents got tired of it and moved to Canada, and my grandparents moved here.)

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

And the Gunpowder Plot _failed_...

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

I know. The whole idea of remembering the Fifth of November was to remind the faithful members of the Anglican Church of how the horrible Catholics would have succeeded had it not been for the grace of God. (I just finished a book entitled Remember, Remember the Fifth of November, that I recommend very highly for anyone whose sole knowledge of the Gunpowder Treason begins and ends with the American prologue to V For Vendetta.) Services for Gunpowder Treason started in 1606 to remind everyone of how much God loved James I, and remained in the prayer book for over 200 years because (a) it was a convenient way to remind everyone of how the Pope was planning to conquer the United Kingdom if Catholics were allowed to run free, and (b) nobody got around to removing it until the particulars were completely forgotten. Hell, Guy Fawkes didn't really appear in any of the classic November 5 bonfires until the Victorian period. (The classic "penny for the Guy" comes from kids begging for pennies for fireworks, and the migration of "Pope Day" to Boston in the 1700s probably had more to do with the founding of the modern Halloween than any of the old Samhain rituals ever did.)

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

I made the mistake this morning of not turning the radio off quickly enough after listening to the 10 AM news this morning. The caller after the news suggested that the right way to handle things was to simply execute 50 of the terrorists at Gitmo each year on 9/11. From his tone, it was obvious that he believed that everyone held there is definitely a confirmed terrorist with no right to any kind of trial.

Hatred begets hatred. I believe we should memorialize that day with a reasonable amount of sorrow for the deaths, not with hatred. We will never solve the terrorist problem with hatred. We shouldn't forget what happened but we should learn from it and move on, not wallow in poisonous hatred.