Instead of speculating about the terrorist’s reasons for choosing 9/11, why not ask ourselves about our reasons for calling it “9/11”?
The media invented that tag-- “9/11”-- mostly because of our own confusion about how to label that day.No other major events in history are known by their dates–they all have names, which we use to emphasize how we remember them.
==D-Day is not called “6/4”
==Pearl Harbor is not called “7/12”
==Hiroshima is not called “8/6”
==Armistice Day is not called by whatever date it was.
==The evacuation at Dunkirk is not called by its date.
(The only exception is the 4th of July—but that is always called by its proper name --Independence Day-- at formal ceremonies.)
Historical events get named by some sort of general consensus about what happened and why it is important. In a formal war, like WW II, everyone knew immediately that the events I just listed were important milestones in a known process. The final results of that process were of course unknown on the day each even happened, but the process itself–a declared war with a known enemy–was well understood.
But Sept 11, was a new, totally confusing process. For days, we didn’t have any idea who did it. (It was so confusing, that we all had trouble just learning to spell Al Qaeda, let alone understand their motives) And we all wondered if there were another 19, or 200, or maybe another 1000, terrorists waiting to attack us whenever the airports would be allowed to re-open.
But the news media had to give a name to all this confusion. Headlines need pithy, catchy names. Unfortunately, nobody came up with one in time, so they just settled on using the date.
And now, we are so used to calling it by the date, so that we think those numbers have hidden,mystical meaning.
(oops, sorry for posting a rant in GQ. …But I feel better now.) 