This morning there was a front page article in the St. Pete Times about a guy who wanted to construct a 9/11 memorial, down around Venice. http://www.tampabay.com/news/humaninterest/911-memorials-put-meaning-to-metal/1190699 He wasn't a survivor, he wasn't an emergency worker, he just wanted to get a piece of steel from the twin towers and build a memorial. Why? In fact he initially wanted to place it on top of an existing 9/11 memorial in a local park. You got to be fucking kidding me, in other words he wanted to build a memorial for the sake of building one, or to ease whatever feelings he may have been dealing with, by pushing them off on the general public. Now normally I would have just muttered something unkind under my breath and gone back to my breakfast, but later on something came up that really highlighted the situation.
One of my friends emailed because he was just feeling down, he was confused by the fact that he wasn’t feeling any empathy for the victims and survivors of 9/11. I had some pretty ready answers because I have been examining this myself recently. The fact of the matter is he doesn’t lack empathy. He is a veteran of the Iraq war, he volunteers for his church and several other charitable organizations, he does things that touch lives and affects peoples futures. What he doesn’t do is engage in a lot of self-aggrandizing behavior. That is the way we are trained in the military. It is considered unseemly to talk about yourself in anything but a self-deprecating manner. After all everyone around you has volunteered to make to make the same sacrifices you have, so what is there to talk about. As a result we get a dangerous job done very efficiently. In the movie We Were Soldiers Lt. Col Moore (played by Mel Gibson) is shown reporting over the radio as bullets zipped around him he tells base “it’s getting pretty sporty down here”. That seems kind of accurate to me because no matter how scared you might be, you never mention it, it just isn’t done. It is just a job whether you’re loading trucks or getting in a firefight you’re just doing your job. That is why; you won’t see very man veterans shedding tears on 9/11. It’s not that we don’t care. It is because we know that we did something about it. We don’t need to stand around and belabor the issue. Do you? And if so why?