9/11 Holiday? NOT!

Somewhere, I recall hearing a proposal to make September 11th a national day of reflection, a national holiday. I further recall saying to myself, what a diabolical idea! Maybe it is a sign of the aging of our culture when we have the need to gather ourselves around a tragic moment and recite it, like we do with the onset of diabetes or macular degeneration. September 11 will become, if it has not already, the starting point of a nation obsession as fruitless and character warping as the organ recitals of the frightened senior citizen.

I say diabolical quite deliberately. For a diabol is the opposite of a symbol. While a symbol exists to bring persons and things together, into proximity. . . a diabol explodes, alienates. A 9/11 Holiday would be the diabolical recollection of the day we bought the mistaken idea that we might render violence for the violence that had been visited on us. That is an idea that is all about alienation, a kind of worldwide game of "king of the mountain." It only leads to exhaustion, excess and broken limbs.

Of course, there is a diabolical side to every national holiday. There is nothing quite as ugly as the speechmaking that gathers around July 4th or Memorial Day or Veteran's Day. Each of these holidays has been coopted to advertise our military dependency and to foreclose thinking about alternatives to warmaking and the use of force. A little study of the origins of each of these holidays will show that they began with a purpose, mostly to expiate the grief of the mistakes of war. Mothers, mostly, grieve over lost children and spouses. They are drawn together to say never again. Only later, do these gut wrenching occasions become celebrations of the glory of war. Only in their diabolical form do these holidays become days of forgetting, days for recruiters and the folly of warmaking. We have taken the bloodbath of the war to end all wars and made of it an occasion to thank a veteran. We took our grief over the carnage of a civil war and made of it a day to plant little flags near the bodies of those most affected by the folly of warmaking.

No, we need not another diabolical day. We do not need to nurture our sense of being wronged. Nor do we need to glory in our capacity to "hit back," to create and demolish enemies.

Recently, a friend of mine interjected into the conversation, "Everything changed on 9/11." About that assertion, I am dubious. If one cannot recall the eternal dimensions of the human struggle, then 9/11 surprises. If one forgets human history, then 9/11 ambushes them. If one represses the great myths of the human heart then the treachery of September 11 astonishes.

If you must do something, let me suggest a short, but important reading for the day. Colman McCarthy has written a little book, "I'd Rather Teach Peace." Let that little tome germinate into some thinking about how we might more constructively have responded to terror on our shores. That, at least can bring our world together.