In Rememberance

I said I wasn't going to post anything, but I didn't want the day to go by without a small remembrance for the victims of the terrorist attacks on the morning of September 11, 2001.

If any of you are reading this in whatever version of the afterlife you believe in, I want you all to know that the world still remembers you, although we have largely forgotten you were flesh and blood humans, people with jobs, families and lives, not symbols to rally around in rage and fear, or an excuse to invade some country that's still trying to get out of the bronze age and fire-worship.

I would like to say that your deaths, violent and horrific as they were, brought us closer together as a nation, as a people, as a PLANET. That your sacrifice made us realize there was more to life than our petty differences. For a moment, maybe that DID happen...But the glimmer of hope we grasped at was yanked from us, and we did nothing to stop it. The spark never caught on. A candle has no hope in a rainstorm.

We are more divided now than when you were alive, if you can believe that.

It would be great if, seven years later, I could tell you that we took control of our government, and stopped the insanity that allowed your deaths to occur in the first place. I'm sorry, we did no such thing. We gave up our freedom and integrity willingly, and we allowed a man who clearly has no love for America or it's inhabitants decide the course of our nation's future for the next 8 years straight.

Your deaths were used simultaneously by a left-wing religious nutjob and a right-wing political prostitute in an attempt to herd the public into their respective psychological slaughterhouses.

And we went, singing hosannas and thanking God for the chance to die at the whim of a madman.

Now, I don't want any of you to quote me on this (you are dead, after all...please be silent), but if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say we're starting to come out of the fog we've been living in for the past decade. We do have another election coming up in a month, and it will be a day of days in our nation's history.

Check back with me at next year's memorial. I may have better news for you then. Until that time, I would like for you all to know that, for some of us, your deaths meant more than a cry for blood, a high-powered campaign slogan or a cheap 30 second soundbite on Fox News.

Some. Not all, or even most really, but...Some of us were changed that morning, and we decided that the world would not be this way within the reach of our arms. And some of us have been living it that way ever since. Our voices are not loud, our following is not strong, but we are here.

And we remember you.

Rest in peace.

We are the centuries.

We are the chin-choppers and the golly whoppers,
and soon we shall discuss the amputation of your head.

We are your singing garbage men, sir and madam,
And we march in cadence behind you,
chanting rhymes that some think odd.

Wir, as they say in the old country,
marschieren weiter wenn alles in Scherben fallt.

We have your Eoliths, and your Mesoliths and your Neoliths.
We have your Babylons and your Pompeii's, your Ceasers and your
chromium-plated (vital ingredient-impregnated) artifacts.

We have your bloody hatchets and your Hiroshimas.

We march in spite of Hell, we do-
Atrophy, Entrophy, and Proteus Vulgaris,
telling bawdy jokes about a farm girl named Eve
and a slick traveling salesman named Lucifer.

We bury your dead, and their reputations.

We bury YOU.

We are the centuries.

Walter Miller Jr.
"A Canticle for Liebowitz"