There's been a lot of comments, blogs, TV programmes today about 9/11 on the tenth anniversary of the attacks. My personal memory is that I was working, in Glasgow in an office in the science park out the far end of Maryhill Road. Would have been just after 2pm when one of the managers came down and said that a light plane had crashed into the World Trade Centre, which was what the first reports said as I remember it. Then everything in the office went quiet. There wasn't a phone call coming into the place, the only call we had all afternoon was from one customer who was in Brazil, and he was just told to put on the TV. He called back 3 weeks after if I remember right. And we all sat there watching the TV for the afternoon and seeing events unfold just as a group. One of the girls I worked with was trying to contact her parents that afternoon, as they were supposed to be flying from Boston that day. She found out they were ok hours later as I remember. And I can't tell you anything else about that week, or even that evening. What happened after everybody knows, eventually we wound up fighting in Iraq as an ultimate consequence of events that day, or that was one of the excuses used at least.
The thing is that it seems to be the amount of commemoration and talk about it comes across as almost a celebration of the events, and that should not be. It's not so much the overkill, and the amount of TV programmes, especially on the History Channel this week, but it's the way it's being done. I don't have any personal connection the the events, no-one I knew was there, I know no-one who died or was injured, so I don't feel any grief for those who died. Sympathy for the families yes, sorry for the loss of people but not actual grief for their deaths. I see grief as a personal thing, you need to know someone to feel it when they die, anything else is just sympathy, not real grief. You can appreciate the sacrifice of Soldiers and that kind of thing, but it's not really grief for their deaths.
But we seem to have come to a point where everyone has to grieve, this I think started with Tony Blair when Diana, Princess of Wales was killed in that car crash and he was saying the stuff about her being the peoples Princess. It's a national mourning thing that occurred, when everyone was supposed to be grief stricken for the loss of someone they saw in the papers but didn't know. I've never quite understood it, it seems to have taken on it's own life and become a performance of something you were meant to do and were not allowed to question. In a sense it's the same with the meeting of the dead coming back from the war that Blair and Bush started at 9/11. In Wootton Bassett they were lining the streets when the bodies were repatriated. That started as a few people stopping to honour the dead as they returned, that being fair enough and a personal thing. But it then took on it's own life and it became a ritual, and in doing so it lost a bit of meaning. When it came to an end it was handed over to another town. That had become a performance, not a thing that was done for peoples own reasons, but just a performance that was put on without thought. It began another way, but that's how it ended up. Just a show. People may believe that it's right, and I'm not going to argue, we respect those who fight for us, or we should anyway, but I'm not sure that something being automatically done helps, I hope I'm never in a position to find out.
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