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Anger & Discontent |
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It seems my fellow blogger, Michelle Malkin, is feeling very angry today.
She’s sporting a t-shirt that reads in Arabic “I will not submit.”
“Never forget,” she writes on her blog. “It’s not just a once-a-year slogan. It’s a 24/7 frame of mind.”
Why on Earth should we forget, when September 11th serves to justify the never-ending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the talk of war in Iran, the War on Terror, the war on civil liberties, the war on sovereignty, the war on diplomacy, the war on Islam, and perhaps many more wars to come. In the last six years, millions of lives have been lost or ruined because Americans will never forget.
I think it’s time we ask a question that applies to many more areas of life than war: what is the virtue of never forgetting? What is the benefit of staying mad?
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I personally hate being angry and hurt. I hate the isolation of refusing to forgive. I hate the self-perpetuating nature of suffering – how anger begets more anger, and pain more pain. I think it damages everyone involved, and ourselves most of all. I can’t imagine anything worse than a “24/7 frame of mind” of remembering something so painful. Does Michelle Malkin really believe that in all the world, the spot that has experienced the greatest justification for lasting pain and anger, for “resistance and remembrance,” and for stubborn refusal to ever embrace forgiveness and tolerance is really lower Manhattan?
Perhaps Michelle Malkin lost someone very close that day. Even if she didn’t, as a mother and a wife and someone with love in her life, I’m quite certain she can imagine the pain. We want never to forget not because we are inherently angry, but because we are inherently loving. “Grief,” as Queen Elizabeth II said to a silent, stunned audience ten days after the attacks, “is the price we pay for love.”
I wish Americans would honor that love by forgetting their anger. We needn’t forget our loved ones, or even the attacks themselves. But we should forget the way we felt that day. In the last six years we have “submitted” and wholly surrendered to the same anger that brought us September 11th, and the damage has been truly astounding.
Never forget does not mean stay angry. Maybe that’s too hard for most Americans to understand but it’s true. Look at other peoples who have had national tragedies. The Japanese never forget Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet they are not angry. Jews never forget the Nazis, yet they are (for the most part) not angry. It is time to let our anger go.
I couldn’t agree more. It’s time America got over what happened and moved on. Whilst we should never forget terrible atrocities, we should also not escalate them to the status of worship that seems to have happened with 9-11. The USA has known relatively little tragedy in its short history compared to many other nations. Yet America seems to be the only one that is caught in a molasses of never-ending grief over one isolated incident.
I’m just tired of the constant references to 9-11. It seems to have evolved from quietly remembering a tragedy to almost a celebration of grief & an egotistical competition to see who can come up with the most heart-rending, emotional tributes.
I think the rest of the world wants America to move on too. Believe it or not, there is a future ahead - it just doesn’t seem to be visible due to so many Americans being mired in the past.
I personally don’t mind being continually angry. Except I was angry before 9/11 and remain angry after it. I was angry about Kosovo and Darfur. About Rodney King and the Jena 6. Afghanistan and Iraq. The closing of auto plants in Flint and sweatshop conditions in China. I don’t think angry is inherently bad; when we’re pushed into a corner with nowhere else to go, we react, we thrash out, and we get angry. John Holloway puts it in a word as the “scream”, that scream against injustice, about wanting dignity and human respect.
It’s our job to use that anger in productive ways and not for wars of retaliation.
There are constructive and destructive ways to remember and constructuve and destructive ways to forget–e.g., you can be consumed by your grief and pain or your can become a stronger person from it.
It seems much of the “remembering” today comes in the form of they did this to us, we must get back at them. The “Us vs. Them” dialog with respect to the “Christian West” and the “Muslim (Middle) East” has been going on far too long without any progress. If anything, 9-11 should remind us that we do not exist in bubbles and that what we do in America affects people in other parts of the world. Conversely, when we remember 9-11, we should also remember what the rest of the world felt and experienced before/after the event. Too much attention is paid to the one catastrophe and its loss of live, and not enough attention is given to the bigger picture and the (many more) lives lost as an effect of U.S. actions after 9-11.
A question that keeps popping into my head is, six years on, how many of those killed on 9-11 would still be alive today? It’s hard to imagine other tragedies/illnesses/accidents, etc. would not have already claimed some of those lives. Granted, that’s probably not the right mindset to use when considering the situation, but it’s something I’ve been contemplating recently to get another perspective.