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Corruption of Remembrance

By Michael C. Gilbert, September 11th, 2006
 

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Remembrance is a subject of some importance to me. For seven years now, every November 1, I host a remembrance party. It's a traditional day for reconnecting with the dead in a number of cultures. My friends and I write about those we've lost with gold and silver in books of black paper. People take time to read what others have written, decorate skulls, and talk in a kind of celebratory environment that often happens when we remind ourselves of our mortality. From time to time, I consider writing about this event at the time it happens, but today, the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, seems more appropriate.

Reading the remembrances in our black books, you come away with one very clear message. We remember the dead by how we live. I live in a country that is in the midst of its own acts of remembrance. As I look back over the last five years, although I am continually touched by the efforts of thousands of individuals and organizations, I am heartbroken and ashamed by our collective response as a nation.

As a country, we have chosen to remember the dead of 9/11, not with life and love, but with death, greed, repression, and lies.

We preyed upon the people's collective anguish to invade the Middle East and in the process kill far more people than were killed on that horrible day. We've transferred untold billions of dollars out of the public coffers and into the hands of the wealthy few. We have worked to build up the machinery of private profit and a network of private killing organizations.

At home, we continue to choose to remember the dead through systematic spying on citizens and through the erosion of civil liberties and other key foundations of civil society. Barely within the reach of our crumbling legal protections, we've engaged in widespread kidnapping, imprisonment, and torture.

I can hardly contain my tears when I ask the dead: Is this how you wanted to be remembered?

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