When we think about the other days we commemorate as Americans--Christmas, Thanksgiving, 4th of July, Juneteenth, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Martin Luther King day, Easter--they're all about public celebrations or celebrating victories in American history--reasons for exultation or gratitude or upholding our highest ideals. They're about the progress we've made or the values we hold. Even Memorial and Veterans Day, which ostensibly honor those who served have their roots in VE Day and Armistice Day, the ending of the two World Wars we won last century.
But despite the few efforts to rebrand 9/11 as Remembrance Day or First Responders Day, inevitably it's about celebrating America's false sense of victimhood. The attacks that are always the central focus are remembered for the loss, for the grievance against the world with the audacity to interrupt our first world slumber with a tiny taste of the violence that these deranged fanatics brought from their troubled section of the world back to us. In wallowing in the ever-revisited shock of those attacks, we are subtly reminded of the "need" for a widely expanded national security state--one rooted in the fear of foreigners with foreign ideas. In short, it's a day for celebrating xenophobia. It's a day for the new American idolatry of perpetual grievance. It's a day for indulging the right-wing fantasy that the whole world hates us, which cultivates the maudlin sentiments intended to make you shut up and salute the flag unquestioningly. And I can't think of anything more unAmerican than saluting the flag unquestioningly.
As a high school government teacher, I note the boredom and disassociation in the faces of my teenaged students who don't understand this unexplored but always re-dredged trauma that occurred 4-5 years before their births. This love of suffering is the same sentiment that eggs on Palestinian and Israeli kids to hate and target one another, that gets Hindus and Buddhists to gang up on each other, that inspires Russian kids to hate Ukrainians, that kept Hutu and Tutsis ready to slaughter each other. There must be a thousands pairings of longstanding ethnic or religious feuds festering around the globe. But such social ethic of resentment is an insult to the most fundamental of American values. We're supposed to leave hatred at the shores. Of course that's not fully our history; but when we fail to live up to that ideal, the contrast forms the most shameful of our failures.
One of our lesser failures occurred on December 7th, 1941. But we don't celebrate December 7th as we do September 11th. Now, where it's appropriate, at the Port of Honolulu, there is a traditional wreath laying ceremony. It is local custom, but it is contextualized. This happened
here; we note our loses, but we move forward. Our nation is defined by defeating fascism in Europe and the Pacific Rim. Twenty-two years after Pearl Harbor, we were celebrating the Mercury Program and building to expand Civil Rights against the stubborn vestiges of slavery--a struggle that led to a new and virtue-building national holiday, Martin Luther King Jr Day. We weren't resenting Japan anymore; we had healed and were now moving in opposition to the xenophobic enclaves in our culture that held us back. Today, across the other 49 states, Pearl Harbor is commented upon, maybe, but not the occasion for a minute of silence, not a renewed digging out at an unhealed wound.
We don't commemorate the beginning of the Confederacy or the first arrival of slaves at Jamestown or shoot off fireworks for Zimmerman Telegram Day. Losers might enjoy wallowing in their losses and their setbacks (I'm looking at you,
Confederate Memorial Day); people who believe the core of our history is behind us rather that being something to build for in the future, people who want to sulk about their lost Glory Days might be attracted to lost causes and the anniversary of when things fell apart, people who define their Americanism by loss and humiliation, from terrorism to election losses. These are the sentiments that come natural to people who want to grieve, who want to resist the changes that come to our society. The morbid love of grievance is what makes them too submerged in old humiliations to get up off the floor and fix what's wrong in the world. Too submerged in pain to build a better future.
I think we should choose the future. I think we should recognize the pain of 9/11, take care of the people who suffered serving on 9/11 and in the wars that followed, but constantly revisiting and opening up an old wound doesn't do us any good. I think instead we should celebrate September 17th, Constitution Day, the day we established an imperfect but hopeful form of government that has continually expanded to include more and more people and provide more and more opportunities for everyone who wants to call our country home. We should restrict national holidays to aspirational goals, to make this country a better place. Commemorating 9/11 moves us in the wrong direction
