Karl Klockars

When it comes down to it, the official timespan for “length of time it takes for a nation to heal from a horrible tragedy” should be defined as follows:

However many years it takes to get to the corresponding date falling on a Friday. That year was this year, Friday, September 11th, when no one batted an eye about being sold a sorority slasher flick by Hollywood, who hollered “Theta Pi or Die on September 11th!”

Never forget, right?

Either that, or maybe 7 years.  Or 6.  5 years wasn’t it – we collectively have a thing about numbers that are half-decades or full decades or multiples of decades, or quarters of centuries or the like.  Why else arbitrarily decide that we had to celebrate Woodstock’s 25th anniversary so huge?  What makes those years more potent than others?  Simple math?  Regardless, any date that can be sold by popular media comes before any other consideration, and if a Tuesday had popped up first to sell records, it would have been that year.  Except we don’t buy records any more, now do we?

I’ll admit, I’m usually pretty mindful of the date, thinking my thinks about watching the rebroadcast of the event on MSNBC or its website, about watching the memorials and observing the moments of silence, about staring at hour after hour of documentaries on the History Channel and its cable bretheren.  Not that anyone would classify it as “looking forward to it,” but by its definition, I would look temporally forward and be aware of it breathing down on us.

The fact that MSNBC would think to turn back the clock on that morning annually was something of an amazing thing – that we knew if we wanted to really remember, to really look history in the face and watch it happen again and again, we could.  If we wanted to, it was there, and we could re-feel the not knowing, the not understanding, the “what happens next” feeling and the “oh shit, that’s what happens next” feeling, and the “what if it never stops” feeling.  I didn’t find that this year.  I looked.

This year, being The Year That We All Forgot, I woke up on Friday morning, looked at the date and finally had it click.  I did the thing that I think we all do:  Played the “where was I?” game.  I remembered getting coffee at the Tasty Bakery in downtown Naperville and getting back into my gold, beat-to-shit 1971 Cadillac Coupe de Ville and puttering the mile to my slave-wage signmaker gig.

This year, after that heartbeat of memory, I went about my daily life like it was no big deal.  Like it was just another day.  There’s a certain sense of victory in that, I think, even if its a small one.  I could choose to look at it as a case of “we’ve finally defeated those pesky terrorists because they don’t have a significant space in our head anymore.”  That if we’ve beaten them out of our front-of-mind consciousness, they’ve just gone away, or some fool idea like that.

I don’t think I like that concept, even if I do acknowledge it.

Why?  Because it’s a false concept.  There’s no reason to it, except to say that “oh well, it doesn’t bother me the way it did before so everything is fine now.”  Maybe since the Truthers have effectively shut up and gone away (save for the lone gunman of Charlie Sheen) people like me don’t have to keep abreast of the latest theory to be debunked.  Or maybe, maybe we just don’t want to think about it any more.

Or maybe it’s because there’s a new President that we don’t associate with 9/11 at all.  That since there’s not a Bush staring us in the face every night, we can put those nasty thoughts to bed of crusades, wars, violence, attacks, IEDs, WMDs, Blackwater, Gitmo, etcetera, etcetera.  Feel-good, man, don’t harsh my mellow, it’s Obama time, we didn’t even know about him til’ 3 years after 9/11, you dig?

God knows I love writing about the crazies, the lunatics, the LIHOP and MIHOP crowds, the Loose Changers and the Screw Loose Changers (up until a couple weeks ago, I didn’t even think of the possibility that “screw loose” could refer to the euphemism of mental instability.  I thought it was just along the lines of “eff these guys in the ear”) and all the things that dance around the heart of the matter.

But this year, I didn’t even think about writing something like this til’ yesterday.  And now it’s the 14th.  I couldn’t even get motivated to throw together a thousand words of merit, praise, rememberance and vigilance.  I sat on the couch, fought off a head cold and watched 4 hours of the History channel.  MSNBC wasn’t running anything any more.  They’d moved on too.  I checked.

I don’t know.  But it seems like we’ve all decided that we don’t want to talk about it anymore.  I think that signifies a loss.  Or is it a victory?  I don’t know.

All I know is that even though “never forget” is a knock-knock joke punchline now, am I naive for being the one to still want to remember?  When everyone else seems to have moved on, is it wrong to be the one to still think back and maybe be a little bit sullen when everyone else is lah-dee-dah, nuttin’ happenin’ here today?

I might be stuck being “that guy,” for better or worse.  Pretty sure I’m okay with that.  There’s worse things to be.  Too bad we lost MSNBC, tho.