Sir, I understand your point here, and I agree with both yourself and everyone else in this thread. May I respectfully note, purely as a source of education, that the date naming method used above is still used throughout most British Commonwealth countries around the world, including us dumb schmuck Aussies.
And why does this date mechanism mean so much to me? Well, I’m a corporate database designer by trade and I forever have to write code which manipulates date strings between American and British methodologies. It’s a royal pain believe me!
That being said, my heart and empathy remains with the all those touched by the tragedy.
You can count on us Aussies at the very least as a people who wish to help you fix the mess believe me. And I know we’re not alone either.
A card store here in Massachusetts already has a sign up calling September 11 “Patriot Day”.
This can’t be a local thing – Massachusetts already had “Patriot’s Day” in April (celebrating the battles of Concord and Lexington). Somebody from MA would never choose “Patriot Day” as a name for a day of remembrance. Plus, this was at a Hallmark store.
Does anyone know if other card stores are calling this “Patriot Day”?
It should not be a national Holiday.
It should not be a day of mourning and wailing and nashing of teeth.
It should be a day of rememberance and contemplation. It should be a day where everything continues, save only for a Minutes silence.
Making it a day will only lead to it becoming a hallmark holiday.
Due to the proliferation of news media news outlets - which have to have something to talk about to fill their time and space - we’ll be inundated with September 11th related news stories until some bigger story comes along. Paraphrasing what Jon Stewart said on the Charlie Rose show last night (Aug. 9th) that on any given day there is only 10 minutes of news, so that the news shows have to spend the rest of the time analyzing and speculating. Taking that as a given, what’s more readily available topic for them to analyze or speculate about than the horrible events of September 11th?
This isn’t a new phenomenom. News media love anniversery stories of events in recent memory - they always do pointless stories about the anniversery of JFK’s assasination, or D-Day, or Nixon’s resignation, or the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, or some other damn thing. They never do stories about the anniversery of the sinking of the Lusitania or of the Second Battle of Bull Run. I don’t know if they don’t do those stories because they don’t have any film (or videotape) of such events or because they don’t have anyone alive to interview about them. But they have to have something to talk about, and September 11th is an easy and available subject so we’re going to hearing about it for quite a while.
As far as I’m concerned, anniverseries of historic events should only be observed when there is a chance that the event was important and yet possibily will be forgotten. Because September 11th won’t be forgotten anytime soon therefore there it is not necessary for anyone to specially commemorate the event this year. We had all the memorial services last year, cried our hearts and our eyes out and buried the dead, so why do all that again this year?
It is a much smaller example, but back in 1993 the Cleveland Indians had two players - Tim Crews and Steve Olin - killed in a horrible boating accident during spring training. It was a shocking and horrible event to everyone involved. There was much mourning by the team, publically and privately. The next year at spring training the reporters asked Mike Hargrove, the Indians manager, what the Indians were going to do to commemorate the anniversery of Olin and Crew’s death. Hargrove said, and quite correctly, that the Indians weren’t going to do anything. He was quite eloquent and I cannot remember his quote directly, but it was to the effect that the team had done its mourning already last year and that now it was time to get on with life rather than dredging up the dead.
This is a big deal for my coworkers and me, since we worked in the WTC. My firm is planning a series of events for the first anniversary. New York City is doing the same. I imagine that the need to have yearly memorial-type services and whatnot will fade after this coming year, and that’s fine with me.
<<Popping my head back in here to see how it’s going>>
Well, Patrick, of course it won’t be forgotten, not if we keep having events to commemorate it on every significan interval. (1 week, 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, ad nauseam). The whole thing seems very circular to me, in that somebody out there thinks that the American public is so short-sighted that we will forget, so we keep having anniversary events. The people out there who need to forget in order to heal never will because of the constant reminders, made by the people who think we’ll forget. et cetera, et cetera…
I don’t know where the dividing line should be. CalMeacham, if what you say is true all over, that’s clearly crossing the line.
I think it’ll take half a century before people even begin to forget the day the Arab-American War began.
Last week I was out jogging around Green Lake in Seattle, when I suddenly ran into a brace of antiwar protesters and a large group of people setting up little paper rafts with candles on them with Japanese lettering.
It took me a dozen strides before I associated the date… August 6. Hiroshima. Seventy thousand civilians dead.
I see a huge difference between Pearl Harbor day and 11 September: We were attacked by a legitimate government with active military forces on active military forces, versus being attacked by 20 zealots with plastic knives and sporks, who commandeered civilian assets to make a political statement.
It’s for the latter reason that I think Congress will pass a resolution marking the anniversary, but I don’t think it will ever become a national holiday.
My own personal bent: 9/11 is a reassertion of why I go to work every day. Yeah, we got blindsided, but I’ll keep doing everything I can to prevent it from happening again.
Tripler
They tried to kill my mother. Nothing pisses me off more. . .