Never Forget

I don't want to stomp on anybody's grief or anything but somebody just dropped the straw that broke my back. For the past month, the hysteria leading up to the 10th anniversary of 9/11 has been bothering me. And then on 9/11 we saw endless back to back pieces about the attack and people's grief, and thousands of shots of people running through the streets of New York, in terror. There were news coverages, personal memories, talk shows, and the cable channels which have no live programming were running schlocky movies about personal stories of tragedy and heroism of that day)

(The only "new" story I heard was a 10 minute video narrated by Tom Hanks, which is well worth your watching)

People felt the need to relive it all again and again and again and yeah, OK. If that's what you need to do, fine, but does everybody have to repeat "Never forget" or "We will always remember?"

NEVER FORGET? That's like saying to a family grieving the loss of a child "You'll always remember him." Like we're going to say "Yes, we have three children. I think we used to have more, but I'm not sure."

This was the worst attack on American soil in the history of our country and everybody is acting like if we don't keep playing and replaying the same coverage that we have seen yearly for the past ten years, we might somehow forget about it.

We Americans seem to have the need to wring the most emotion out of every little thing, so when we are hit with an event of such staggering magnitude, everybody goes into overdrive, each network trying to outdo the other one in who can get the most tears, the most horror out of that event.

No, you don't want to let it rest, but sheesh...the only event that I've seen in my life that got more ridiculous coverage was the 3 day non-stop tribute to Tim Russert following his death. I respected Tim Russert, but NBC kept the grief going endlessly. In fact, NBC may have given Russert's death even more coverage than the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

I spent 9/11 with a NCIS marathon, after watching the ceremonies at Ground Zero. I didn't need to see the close-ups of survivors hands tracing the names of the loved ones they lost, or get close-ups of eyes welling with tears. I felt I had given the event all the attention it deserved, with the respect that it deserved, but I was not about to sit here and wallow in show after show, interview after interview, family grief after family grief just so I could be sure that I would "never forget."

Somehow I suspect that if I hadn't even turned on the television on 9/11, I might still have remembered the event.

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But in the good news department, we have ordered the new Pergo!!! They are coming out to measure the living room on Thursday and we'll set up an installation date at that time.