If you have already put this issue aside, congratulations and read no further.

In his article Let’s Cancel 9/11, Tom Engelhardt starts asking some questions that need to be asked.

Ask yourself this: ten years into the post-9/11 era, haven’t we had enough of ourselves?  If we have any respect for history or humanity or decency left, isn’t it time to rip the Band-Aid off the wound, to remove 9/11 from our collective consciousness?  No more invocations of those attacks to explain otherwise inexplicable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our oh-so-global war on terror.  No more invocations of 9/11 to keep the Pentagon and the national security state flooded with money.  No more invocations of 9/11 to justify every encroachment on liberty, every new step in the surveillance of Americans, every advance in pat-downs and wand-downs and strip downs that keeps fear high and the homeland security state afloat.

Rather than thinking of ripping off the Band-Aid as a cure, I think of the illness as constant picking at a scab.  In this country we memorialize the sneak attack on us at Pearl Harbor, the blowing up of the Maine (Remember the Maine!), the defeat at the Alamo (Remember the Alamo!) and now we have 9/11.

Is it common in other countries to memorialize incidents of their own victimization?  The Irish remember Bloody Sunday and other cultures remember affronts that happened thousands of years ago. We Jews are taught to always bring up The Holocaust.  Yet, I think it is time to put all of this in its proper place.

In Tom Engelhardt’s column he said,

And surely it’s our duty in this world of loss to remember the dead, those close to us and those more removed who mattered in our national or even planetary lives.  Many of those who loved and were close to the victims of 9/11 are undoubtedly attached to the yearly ceremonies that surround their deceased wives, husbands, lovers, children, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters.  For the nightmare of 9/11, they deserve a memorial.  But we don’t.