On “What’s Your 9/11?”, TPM Reader DE thinks many of us, across the political spectrum, can’t escape the unresolved politicization of what happened twelve years ago …
I suspect that your question about 9/11 is basically unanswerable, because it gets to the issue of why we have memorials at all, which is itself an unanswerable question. We obviously don’t observe memorials for the dead themselves– they are gone and don’t care what we do. So we must do them for ourselves, out of some belief that we will either feel better or benefit from remembering the dead. Think about, for instance, what Lincoln did in the Gettysburg Address– remembering the dead so that we remember how important the cause was that they died for, and so that we remind ourselves that we should be willing to put our lives on the line for that same cause.
More of ‘What’s Your 9/11?’ … from TPM Reader MS …
I was a congressional intern working at the Capitol on 9/11, so not close enough to see actual carnage, but close enough to be scared. I remember briskly walking (people weren’t running) alongside members of Congress and staffers alike toward the Metro and seeing the plumes across the river. Not sure I even knew then that that was the Pentagon.
