No more closure

There’s been a lot of talk lately in the media about the anniversary of the September 11 attacks: How to commemorate them, how we as a nation are healing in the year since, and how we are progressing in our War on Terror.

I don’t know about you, but I’m over it. I don’t need to hear about another memorial service, I don’t need to stand in line for an hour in New York to see the official view of the WTC site. I don’t need a flag lapel ribbon, thanks. And if I see Old Glory plastered on another car window next to another Cowboy Up! sticker, I’m gonna commit a terrorist act myself. I don’t need revenge, I don’t need closure.

No amount of sound bites or CNN.com headlines will make us feel better or allow the rest of us to get our sleepless nights back. We won’t get back the hours lost in counseling, or on drinking binges or just being scared. I don’t need closure because there’s no getting closure. There’s no making it all better. There’s no such thing as closure for something like this.

So I have a suggestion. Maybe we could go a whole day, just one, without having the September 11 tragedy shoved down our throats like a commodity or a blockbuster movie. Maybe we could go for just 24 hours walking around with our heads in the clouds, pretending that it just didn’t happen. We can all pretend that Osama bin Laden didn’t ever do anything more evil than paving some roads to some Saudi oil fields, that the only grievance he had against the United States had to do with losing a bid on eBay, and that the government decided to rebuild a fifth of the Pentagon simply because they didn’t like the color.

We can pretend we still don’t give a damn about Afghanistan and the plight of its people.

Maybe on the 12th we could have our memorial. On the 12th we can turn on the TV or open the newspaper, and as we are once again assaulted with the images and the memories, we can think about the 11th, and how nice it was to feign innocence again. We can think about the War on Terror and the airport security breaches. We can think about where we’ve been, and what’s become of us.

We can think about what we’ve lost.