decade

I dreaded the "10 year anniversary".

While I appreciate that people want to (and should) remember and pay respects to those who lost their lives in 2001, there is an opportunism about the way the remembrances and tributes have gone that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I wasn't here that day. I was driving in LA when traffic came to a dead stop - more dead stopped than usual - and I had to work my way off of the freeway and drive home, only to watch it over and over and over again. After I moved to New York, it was impossible to escape the discussions, images, and since I worked about two blocks from the World Trade Center, every year the bands and the flags and the rememberers were never more than a look out the window away.

Then I met someone who was more deeply affected by that day than anyone else I knew and I saw what it did to him and what it took from those around him, including me. That he was an asshole already is immaterial, because watching someone - or rather going through the healing process WITH someone who has endured that kind of trauma is heartbreaking, no matter what kind of person they are. It's horrifying and unjust to be unwittingly put in harms way and then have to fumble around and figure out how to move on afterward, with no road map for how to erase it from your mind, or look at the world happily again.

So the 9/11 wine, the 9/11 purchasable handbooks, the 9/11 sweatshirts, hats, ice cream flavors and whatever else they come up with, piss me off. Show some respect already. Unless every cent of those sales goes to medical care for the survivors, or assistance for the educations of children who lost parents, no one should be making a fucking cent off of this tragedy.

And if you are, shame on you.