A Surfeit of Memorials

This is, to some extent, a repost of something I wrote on Facebook exactly one year ago.

I'm about to post something that I suspect is going to get me a lot of flack.

Is it time to stop obsessing over the anniversaries of 9/11? Yes, it should not be forgotten, but must we make a fetish of its commemoration? I was 9 years old on the 20th anniversary of Pearl Harbor...and I do not recall TV broadcasts interrupting their schedules to show the memorial services in Hawaii. They were featured on the evening news, but not presented as a special event. I do not recall my mother and father making a big deal of the date.

When do we reach a point where we can say, "Yes, this happened--it was tragic, it was disastrous, it changed the way we live our lives...but we cannot let it rule us forever"?

Update: I was surprised to see so much about 9/11 again today. In the midst of a pandemic that has killed many multiples of the dead from that date, I am surprised that it still rates this kind of coverage. Foreign terrorism of this kind is no longer a deadly threat to the United States. (To be honest, it really hasn't been for much of the past 19 years at all.) We now face a more political threat--attempts to interfere with our elections, to divide the nation in all sorts of ways, many of which seem to be instigated and/or supported by people in our own government.

Why do we obsess over this one foreign attack and seem so oblivious to the domestic threats that have been and continue to be far more dangerous and effective?