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A Day in September
This is coming a few hours late, but I thought it was worth posting. Originally published just weeks after the Twin Towers fell, it’s the best editorial piece I’ve ever read about 9/11. It still manages to make me cry and laugh simultaneously, and it somehow pulls off being funny but tasteful, which is no easy task when you’re writing about a tragedy of this scale. I am even fond of its spiritual spin, and that’s saying a lot as a staunch agnostic.
What’s strange is that after rereading this piece today, I was struck by its timelessness and universality. Really, you could apply the same theme to so many other examples of senseless deaths, which makes the article all the more emotionally moving because it takes on a whole new relevance nowadays. Read it yourself, and then consider America’s actions following 9/11. Somehow I don’t think “Invade Foreign Countries/Kill 100,000+ Innocent People” were on the list of what Jesus would do. (And this is as religious as you’ll ever get me.)
How ironic that today our country was not alone in mourning 9/11 victims. Millions around the world must have joined us in grief, not for the lives lost beneath the rubble of Lower Manhattan but for the countless non-Americans made victims in our attempt to right this wrong with nothing less than blood.
September 12th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
I can’t believe I haven’t come across that piece in the last 6 years. Thanks for linking to it, it resonates with all my core beliefs, not just on a religious level, but as a human. Thanks, Elle!
September 12th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
I’m really glad you brought up September 11th… it really felt yesterday like everyone forgot about it entirely, like no one cares about the dead anymore. While I disagree with your whole “we should be crying for the innocent victims in Iraq more than for our own” sentiment- I think you always have to care for your own more than for any others- at least you remembered, and reminded us all (especially those of us that were there) what we lived through. Thank you for that.
September 13th, 2007 at 10:47 am
Frances…I have to say, I go to school up the block from Ground Zero and believe you me, no one forgot about 9/11. The bagpipes, the cameras, the monks, the news crews, the t-shirts, the signs…and we even discussed it in my class. “Never again” feels like empty rhetoric in this day and age but “never forget”…we won’t.
October 1st, 2007 at 1:40 pm
We all mourn the innocent who were killed that day. To your credit you also mourn the innocents killed in (BS) response to that day.
Unfortunately you have yet to grasp the extent of the evil that manifested itself on September 11, and that it has absolutely nothing to do with god.
Outside each of our bubbles and comfort zones there is the world as it really is. Some people’s bubbles are thicker and obscure more of that reality than others’.
The Crimson has recently removed the comment feature from their website because some people were beginning to talk about the reality behind the 9/11 crimes. That is a shame, and quite pathetic since it will not have the desired effect.
On a lighter note, I found your URL in a faculty member’s browser history while doing my thang at work. :)
Keep searching for meaning in life–you may never find it but you might stumble onto some truth.