Six years on...

I wonder how many people are going to mark the day today. It's odd, but this year "feels" different than last year- the five-year mark has been passed, I suppose.

I still think about all the people who died. How horrible. Moms, dads, brothers, sisters, uncles, grandparents...all of those life-webs with a strand violently pulled out. The human tapestry frayed. That's what stays with me. How many people's lives were changed violently and suddenly.

I also think about the fear that followed that day - the sense of sitting around waiting for the proverbial "other shoe to drop." (I remember going out and gassing up my car - in case I had to, I don't know run for the hills?). I don't feel that this year. The fear has pretty much faded, which is a good thing.

I detect a certain weariness from some quarters - a sense of "but can't we move on already?"

I don't know. There's a difference between going about your life bravely and not letting yourself be scared, and pretending the thing never happened. I don't want us to pretend it never happened because that could then allow certain things...it could be like the slow boiling of the frog that never notices the temperature is going up in the water he's sitting in until it's too late. Pretending it never happened leads to pretending that there are not those who would change our culture - not for the better, at least not as far as most of us are concerned.

We need to define who we are.

I think of the stuff that happened after that day - how there was a big outpouring of love, it seemed. People did things they wouldn't otherwise do. It was like there was a suspension of the usual hostilities that exist in our culture.

Sadly, we've gone back to the snark and the sniping. (I don't know if that's part of the "pretend it never happened" squadron).

I don't want to see this day become another hollow "Federal Holiday" - already the calendars I have up at home and in my office refer to it as "Patriot Day." A pretty, sanitized name. "Patriot Day." It sounds so bloodless - like a Fourth of July with out the fireworks, without the memory of Jefferson and the Declaration.

I hope that in my lifetime we do not see "Patriot Day" become a time for carpet sales and dumb television ads - it's happened to Presidents' Day, and it's even happening to Martin Luther King Day in some quarters.

Maybe we need to re-name the day "Hell No" day. As in, "Hell no," we won't let families living on our soil as our citizens stone their daughters to death because she got pregnant out of wedlock. As in, "Hell, no," we won't make accommodations on college campuses for some faiths and then tell others that they can't have a classroom in which to meet after school. As in "Hell, no," we won't ban certain books or certain speech or certain whatever, simply because some people's sensibilities are offended by them. And "Hell, no," we won't pull grandma out of her wheelchair at the airport and take it to bits because we want to show the world how "sensitive" we are in searching passengers and not-profiling.

I don't know. I didn't mean to get so belligerent about it. But I have a friend - a woman from Britain who grew up there in the 40s and 50s - who says she will not go back now, because it's "changed" so much. When pressed, I learned that "changed" was a polite euphemism for "they've made so many accommodations for the separatist-minded Muslims that it doesn't feel like home any more." And that's sad. I had looked forward sometime to maybe GOING to Britain for a visit - but now I feel less inclined after hearing from my friend some of the things that she has seen while over there. And I don't want my country to change in that way.