I went to a free concert yesterday – in the rain – held in honor of the policemen who lost their lives on 9/11. It was the police force’s band – and a flag was at halfmast above them – and all the musicians were cops, in their dress blues … There weren’t too many people there, due to the rain – but those of us who were, huddled under umbrellas, were certainly happy to be there. There were lots of cops, tons of cops, milling around – watching, taking pictures, chatting with their musician buddies. Cops holding trombones, cops holding drumsticks or flutes … It wasn’t a dirge-like affair, it had some lightness to it. Let us not make a fetish of our pain. But let us always remember. That was what the concert was like.
Here they are setting up.
And then I went to the firehouse in Hell’s Kitchen, the one decimated by the attack – in terms of firefighters killed – and left a flower outside. I wasn’t the only one who had thought of that. Flowers heaped up outside.
And some dude stood there, in a kilt, playing bagpipes in the rain.
Then I came home, made dinner, and watched Dune.
Because life goes on. We survive. We don’t just survive. We flourish. We have private concerns, we invest in our personal lives, we do stupid shit just because we enjoy it. We have fun. We DON’T walk around remembering it at every second. Because you know why? We’re stronger than that. Did the Pearl Harbor generation obsess on how much to memorialize the event every year? No. You know why? Because they were too busy – with war, with life back home, with life in general – to obsess on all the wrong things. They were made of stronger stuff.
And so should we be.
As long as you know what it is to be human, you know that you will have no danger of “forgetting”. YOU are in charge of that. Even if you live in an area that does not have a nice parade, or a nice memorial – or if you feel like you’re the only one who is taking the time to remember … why spend precious moments bitching about it? Form a parade then. Why spend precious moments bitching that everyone around you isn’t commemorating the day like you think they should? (Meanwhile: it is very dangerous to assume that something isn’t happening just because you can’t see it. How do you know that that woman sitting in a bar with her friends having cocktails on 9/11 didn’t lose someone that day 6 years ago and she just needs to go out and laugh and LIVE? Or how do you know that she didn’t have her own private way to remember, lighting a candle in church, or saying a prayer, or whatever? Something you can’t see? Be very very careful when you judge only on what you see. So often you will be wrong. To quote Longfellow, one of my favorites of his: “Believe me, every man has his secret sorrows, which the world knows not; and oftimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.”)
So if you feel that remembrance is lacking in your area? Create something then. Create your own memorial. Put out a call to veterans in the area. See what they would like. Create something to honor the dead, be a leader. I don’t know. Figure it out. Isn’t that what we Americans are supposed to do? Figure shit out on our own?
And THAT is the best way we can remember.
Something like this. As I’m sure you all know, we don’t have a goddamn memorial here in New York yet. For Christ’s sake. Do not even get me started on that bullshit. And so those in neighborhoods have been creating their own.
Life goes on.
Yet we always remember.
