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Should 9/11 Be a Holiday?
September 13, 2002
by John Bloom
Last Wednesday sure did feel like a holiday.
Holiday means holy day, and that day was so holy you had people prostrating themselves on Ground Zero, keening, praying, invoking the Almighty, calling on our ancestors (notably Lincoln), and, oddly enough, talking a lot about forgetfulness.
"We Will Never Forget" says the banner draped on a building near Ground Zero.
"Lest We Forget" said the front page of the Daily News.
"We Will Always Remember" said a full-page ad placed by Aon Corporation.
In fact, variations of this phrase were invoked so many times that eventually it begged the question: Why are you so afraid of forgetting?
No one above the age of 3 would ever forget September 11th, but if the phrase is meant to mean "Let We As a People and a Nation Never Forget," or "Let Mankind Never Forget," then I have to say that, like "eternal love," it's a fine sentiment, but it has no grounding in human nature.
Of course we'll forget, just as every tragedy and atrocity since the beginning of time has become ossified by history, reduced to dry rhetoric, and entombed by the elements. Very few events leave any trace beyond the memories of those who experienced them, and after a few generations even that is gone. We're ephemeral. Our lives are snuffed quickly.
Even the rallying cry of my native state, "Remember the Alamo," is subject to ridicule, satire, and outright rejection today, especially by Mexican-Americans who no longer think it's fitting to invoke the slogan. The marauding Mexican Army was the Al Qaeda of its day, complete with a leering evil figurehead (Santa Anna) and a taste for slaughter. I'm sure the people who buried the Alamo dead couldn't imagine a time in the future when all men wouldn't remove their hats and lower their heads when passing the site. The Alamo was a Ground Zero that passed into history, then legend, then academia, then various movie treatments, and finally into tourist attraction and souvenir slogan. (Remember the Alamodome?) When I was a child we had to study it in school, but now that's been eliminated most places as being irrelevant. It took less than two centuries to destroy the original meaning.
So should September 11th become a national holiday? According to USA Today, half of us think so. The support doesn't surprise me, because we've become a nation that loves to observe death anniversaries. We do it for celebrities (Princess Di, Elvis), we do it for Presidents (JFK), and we do it for mass murders (Oklahoma City). We're superstitious. We're numerologists. Since most of us don't believe in an afterlife, we have to constantly reinforce the idea that the last day a certain person moved on Earth is invested with great meaning.
But we weren't always like this. For the first 200 years we honored birth days and victory days, not death days and days we got our butts kicked. When Congress established Lincoln's holiday, they chose his birthday, not the day of his assassination. When Congress chose an Independence Day, they searched back in time for the day when we seemed to be strongest and most defiant. (They actually missed it by two days, but they were trying.) For World War II, we celebrate the armistice, not the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Alamo still stands, but Texas Independence Day is the day Santa Anna was defeated on the fields at San Jacinto, and that's where the monument stands, not in San Antonio.
We were always a future-looking nation, and in fact one of our founding principles was the elimination of ancestor-worship in whatever form it took. There were to be no lords nor legends.
And now all that's changed. Even before there was a Ground Zero, Lower Manhattan was being turned into a mortuary. About ten years ago, a construction crew breaking ground for a new federal building unearthed an old cemetery. It was marked on old maps simply as "Negro Cemetery," the principal black burial ground from the 17th century until about 1821.
Rather than simply do the usual archeological survey--the typical procedure for old cemeteries containing Moravians, Czechs, Germans, Irish and Dutch--there was a demand by politicians that the ground be declared sacred and preserved forever. And that's what happened. It's now a little green plot surrounded by skyscrapers, with a historical landmark sign and a new name: "African Burial Ground," a name it never had when it was actually used as a cemetery.
Elsewhere in Lower Manhattan there are burial grounds at St. Paul's Chapel and Trinity Chapel, a Holocaust Museum in Battery Park City, and an odd monument to victims of the Irish potato famine, complete with broken stone fences, clover patches and dirt footpaths to simulate the rural Ireland of our imagination. It's especially ironic that the monument honors Ireland, a Catholic nation in which cremation is common and "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" is a given. The Irish virtually invented the wake-- the joyous celebration after the body is gone.
Holidays should be about hope, not regret. If we truly want to find a way to honor the dead in celebration, not in pity, then the way to do it would be to somehow combine September 11th celebrations with the September holiday that almost went totally unnoticed this year: Labor Day.
For some reason I've never understood, we're the only nation in the world that celebrates a workers' holiday in September, the month before the harvest, instead of May 1, the end of the planting season. But if the victims of the World Trade Center attacks had a common denominator, it's that they were all laborers--secretaries, stockbrokers, janitors, computer programmers, restaurant workers, news vendors, messengers, managers. Most of them were commuters from New Jersey and Long Island. Most of the Pentagon dead were support personnel. Most of the aircraft victims were flying for business.
So why not simply make Labor Day September 11th? It would recognize the dead for what they are--the essence of working- class America--and for what they did, not simply for the way they died. It would be a way to celebrate their lives, not their deaths.
© Copyright 2002 United Press International and John Bloom