 Originally Posted by blind2d
Hm. I don't know. It's hard to feel anything. I mean... For me personally, and how old when I was when it happened... It seems like such a long time ago. I... I do feel sad for all the people who died. I do. I'm not a monster.
But... Am I going to watch any specials? Or have a vigil? Or something like that? No. No I won't. Because... then, in maybe just some small way... to me... the terrorists win, since none of my family or friends were killed in the attack.
Just my outlook.
I hear you, brother blind. Everyone was affected in their own personal way and everyone needs to remember what happened and deal with it in their own personal way. In my book, you need to do what you think should be done. If that means to go about your daily business then that's ok too.
When I was younger, ten years seemed to me to be a mega-long-ass time. But I was married on September 7, 2001 and was on my honeymoon on September 11th and saw the world change from a hotel suite tv in Las Vegas. I went outside with my new wife and found the casinos to be nearly empty, the streets deserted, the televisions in the sports bars all turned to the news, the airports shut down, and everyone grim and angry and sad and confused behind our common mask of a serious looking expression suggestive of both determination and loss. It was a scary time indeed, and my new wife and I knew that everything had changed and nothing would ever be the same as it had been.
Having just celebrated my 10 year wedding anniversary, I am amazed at how quickly the years have rushed past me and flown by. It is as if I got married last month, and I remember 9/11 like it was yesterday.
Let me say though for me, much like you, I won't be watching any specials, attending any vigils, won't be buying into any corporate exploitation of the pain of a nation for petty fiscal gain or partisan political posturing. If others choose to do so, I am sure that it is for their own good personal reasons. And to do so doesn't necessarily mean that the terrorists are winning either in as much as it means that lots of folks wish to show that they haven't forgotten how the terrorists have changed the world for all of us. And by that I mean all of us - me and you included, brother, regardless of how we choose to memorialize or not to memorialize what had happened.
I don't know how old you were when it happened, nor does it matter how old you were. For me, I am old enough to remember a more simple, maybe a much more naive time before this all went down. Though I didn't know it at the time, it was and is a much more naive and simple world that I now dearly miss. Since we all live now in the same state of affairs in this same place where we are all a little less naive now, that is so much less simple than it had been before and has now become ever so much more complex - you, me, our brothers and sisters here on HPTOD, our volunteer armed forces who are risking their lives to defend us, cops & firemen, methodists & atheists, faux hipsters and junkie poets - all of us people everywhere - we are all in this space together.
My biggest fear is that the younger generations, not being old enough to remember how it was before this shit all went down, will grow up thinking that this is all just a figment of status quo, that the way it is now is the way it always was and always will be, and that the entire business is a mundane part of the normal routine of life. And if that happens, then the terrorists do have alegitimate victory to claim as theirs, however small that may be. And for the sake of all those lives lost, we should strive to make sure that is not the case.
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Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [click for more]
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Evidently, 9/11 makes eagles cry. 
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