Can I just say bluntly.
I am totally and completely over 9/11. Over it. I’ve mourned, grieved, went through the stages, moved on.
Look, I am a New Yorker, I was in the city that day. I watched the towers burn from my attic window. i knew people who died. I almost dropped out of school because I couldn’t go back for weeks after. I didn’t want to leave my city and my family.
I went down to Ground Zero a week later. I stood on Broad Street and saw the twisted remains of the bottom of the South Tower. I walked across Broadway as a truck full of obviously full body bags went past. I still choke when I think about the smell — that smell of rotting corpses.
I remember hearing the droning of an air raid siren because the city was testing them “just in case.”
I remember watching the smoke rising from the rubble from my own house for days. I remember taking my car to the car wash to clean the dust off of it. Was some of that ashes of victims?
I can remember the feeling of hearing that a girl I went to grammar school with lost her father, and one of the victims who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th Floor was the brother of a woman who died of cancer three years earlier who served on the PTA with my mom. They were their parents’ only two children. Both parents were still alive. I remember hearing about the guy who worked for AON in the South Tower who went on a few dates with my mom’s friend in 1999.
But none of these people were personal to me. I didn’t really know them, I wasn’t related to them. Your heart bleeds, but then it moves on.
I went back to school, and I finished and I graduated and I got a career in journalism and now in marketing. I made friends, won awards and watched Manhattan grow taller and better.
I witnessed how the attacks were exploited to pass unconstitutional laws and fight unconstitutional wars. I saw how #NeverForget suddenly stopped being a catchphrase to Republicans when first responders asked the federal government for help.
I went to memorials at first, then I stopped. I covered memorials in Queens neighborhoods, and watched as they grew smaller each year until there were more politicians at these events than residents. I bore the brunt of angry people who blamed “the media” for not doing wall-to-wall coverage of the memorials anymore. “Why did people forget?”
They didn’t.
And I have to say, I reached peak 9/11 when my friends and I went to the mall in 2007 and they played for me a rendition of Bryan Adams’ “Heaven” remixed with a little girl talking to her daddy who died on 9/11. It made them cry. I rolled my eyes. Had we gotten so mindfucked by grief that we didn’t even pay attention to what the goddamn song was about before we remixed it? It’s creepy as fuck to hear about “lying here in my arms” and a little girl going “miss you daddy.”
(Never mind the girl was NOT the child of a 9/11 victim)
I’m just over it. It’s been 15 years, the world has changed, the city has changed, it’s time to move on. And every year I get told I’m being offensive because I don’t sit in front of a TV for four hours to listen to names being read, or that I go out to eat or shop or do something else on 9/11. That my “lack of acknowledgement” of the tragedy is somehow offensive to firefighters or cops.
A friend of mine, who married a firefighter (who only got his job because he was one of the many who replaced the 300+ who died on 9/11) said to me yesterday: “My husband runs into burning buildings, the least you can do is honor him on 9/11”
And now we watch like vouyers as children who don’t have any recollection of that day or were not even born yet are trotted out before us to tell us how they “grieve” for the loss of a parent or relative they never met. Like that’s not going to fuck up their minds.
I’m over it. You can have your tragedy porn. Never forgetting doesn’t require me to constant reminder.