What do you think of the recognition every year of a tragedy that has been in the public eye?

Maybe I am getting this wrong, but I think it’s fine and respectful to remember the people of the tragedy every year ,but think it’s rather strange to remember the tragedy itself every year.

Yearly remembrance of 9/11 is still useful in drumming up blind jingoistic support for our no-end-in-sight wars in the Middle East. When it’s no longer useful for that the annual celebrations will cease.

We remember Pearl Harbor Day. That’s the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

So it’s a long held tradition in the US at least. I’m not sure what the purpose is, other than to remember.

Lest we forget.

I am disgusted by the selection of which “tragedies” are being commemorated.
No one in the west commemorates or mourns the nuclear terrorism of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And yet they are bemoaning 9/11.
It is like if the Nazis were commemorating the internment of nazi soldiers in gulags, while at the same time celebrating the holocaust.
it almost makes me want to celebrate 9/11

I don’t recall where I read it – and it bugs the hell out of me, because it was just within the past year or two – where a comment had been made to an American military officer from a foreign counterpart (maybe even an adversary) remarking upon the peculiar American tendency to memorialize, almost even to celebrate, notable defeats.

The instances cited were Bunker Hill, an American defeat (a Pyrrhic victory by the British regulars, who lost three times as many soldiers, but still an American military loss of a strategic high ground) at the start of the Revolutionary War, the Alamo, where every American defender was slaughtered, Pearl Harbor, and now, of course, “9/11”. In fact, though this example wasn’t made, you could also add “Remember the Maine!” to the list, although that has been pretty well proven to be an internal coal bunker explosion, and not any kind of Spanish attack on that battleship prior to the start of the Spanish-American War.

I can’t explain it, either, @chyna. But maybe it’s not so particularly American, either.

I also recall (vaguely) a story about a man taking a taxicab ride in New York City, where he starts a conversation with the driver, who is obviously a recent immigrant. The driver eventually explains that he is from Turkey. The passenger tells of his experiences with other drivers in the past, immigrants from other nations, and remarks that a few years ago he had a ride from an Afghan driver. At this the driver becomes visibly agitated and emotional. The passenger asks him what is wrong. The driver exclaims, in broken English, “Those pigs! Dogs! I hate them all! They killed a member of my family!” The passenger sympathizes with the driver and asks for more details, such as when the incident took place. “In 1315,” the driver mutters.

9/11 was the worst attack against America ever. It is only right to remember it and grieve.

Far worse is the growing trend of complete strangers who feel the need to place flowers at the scene of an accident/tragedy.
Stop it, you fucking morons!

@CWOTUS

And the especially stupid thing about the Alamo is that they knew it was indefensible. It was a church, not a fort, and occupied strategically insignificant ground. Yet they choose to make their stand there rather than falling back to a more strategically valuable, and more defensible location. The Alamo was, in my view, tantamount to mass suicide.

One of the examples I was thinking of, other than 9/11 was Marshall University in West Virginia lost an entire football team when the plane they were on crashed in November 1970. (Mathew Mcconaughey was in a movie depicting this tragedy called We Are Marshall). They have had a memorial every year since. A friend of mine’s father taught at the university at that time and felt it made people relive the tragedy every year, where some people would have liked to have just moved on.

More annoying to me is the celebrity death memorials every year. Michael Jackson is the most annoying to me personally.

I feel as though the whole 9/11 catastrophe should be put to rest, instead I think we should focus on what we are more worried about, being the current issues in life.