Agreed, Broomstick. Those people’s lives shouldn’t be any more commemoratable than anyone else who has died (other than maybe the firefighters but even then they get memorialised more than other firefighters who died in the line of duty).
Gracer, my dad was a suicide so I feel your pain. Kind of unfair, like (in a different way) people with Sept. 11 anniversaries or birthdays.
Something that makes my blasé response perhaps even more bizarre: just as recently as 1997 I lived in Jersey City and took the PATH train every morning over to my job in Lower Manhattan. I never worked in the WTC itself, but the station I used was the one below the towers, so I walked through that lobby ten times a week.
And my apartment was near the Exchange Place station on the Jersey side. People from outside the area may think “oh you were way over in Jersey”; but anyone from the area knows that we basically had the WTC towering over us. It is literally a four minute subway ride from there to the WTC–those are two adjacent stops.
I didn’t know anyone who works in the WTC though; and the kind of people I hung out with were far more like the hipsters in the infamous photo that Frank Rich highlighted, than like the traders at Cantor Fitzgerald.
Not familiar with it. Don’t leave us hanging!
I loved the Onion “Holy Fucking Shit” issue, especially the woman from the Midwest who baked a flag shaped cake. 
Another arguably inappropriate response I had in the post-9/11 period was to be kind of mortified by all the garish poor taste being put on display. It was like we needed a Queer Eye for the Whole Fucking Country or something, LOL. And the miniature flag factories in China had to go into overdrive so everyone could festoon their SUVs with patriotic flair…blech. The ascent of Pelosi and then Obama was rather refreshing in its palate-cleansing nature, after five years of being vomited on by all that red-white-and-blue confetti.
Omigod, that’s right! LOL (Although on the flip side, it may have prevented people from being fully aware that he was later proven to be innocent.)
ETA: Machine Elf, GMTA. Which reminds me: does anyone else remember when there was all kinds of sonorous talk about when it would be appropriate to laugh again, and how we would henceforth be a more serious country that is not trafficking in celebrity gossip and sensationalism? Ha, I knew that was a joke from the get-go.