Throwback Thursday - THAT Day.

[penpusher]

The entry that this post is based on is HERE

We've had 25 years to try and make sense of an event that changed the lives of Americans in ways we are still coming to grips with, and I feel as if we haven't actually made much progress when it comes to learning.

When you see the indifference in the war going on with Israel and Palestine, the United States' particiaption in it and the conditions people are being forced to live in, in that war zone, we really haven't learned much.

When you see their hospitals and schools targeted and no food or proper drinking water even in their makeshift tents and shelters, and to have little to no response from Americans, we really haven't learned much.

When you see people like former Mayor Giuliani, the man who was in charge of New York on that day, saying that he doesn't think current Mayort Zorhan Mamdani should attend the memorial services (essentially because Mayor Mamdani is a practicing Muslim), we really haven't learned much.

For a ceremony that is designed to honor humanity, to remember people who were dealt a fate they didn't deserve and to preserve the legacy of what all of that means on one hand, while actively choosing to ignore people who are, essentially, in the same situation as those people just going to work on a random Tuesday, is a difficult thing to face.

But the United States has always been a series of difficult juxtapositions, that, when you examine them, feel completely wrong and against the concepts that were stated what this country was supposed to be about. That's why people don't want to look too closely. And that's why the learning process is slow.

As far as I can tell, this ceremony is going to go on, forever, every September 11th. I just wish we could make space for the other innocents who will also suffer and die in a cruel, heartless and preventable way, just like everyone who died on that day, and all of the people who have died since that day, due to complications from respiratory diseases and cancers they got from the toxic clouds in Lower Manhattan as the buildings were destroyed, all because a couple of handfuls of terrorists did what they did, and because we couldn't see beyond the hate they had for our country, to the humanity we need to display, to truly honor the people who we lost.