Ivan Eland: Fear Mongering on the Anniversary of 9/11

[Contrary1]

"Like JFK's assassination in 1963 and the moon landing in 1969, people remember where they were and what they were doing on Sept. 11, 2001. In my case, just a few hours before the attack, I was walking down one of the corridors of the Pentagon that was later obliterated by the hijacked aircraft. After the attack, on 9/11, after most of Washington, D.C., went home from work early, I walked down the streets of a ghost town on my way to do media interview after media interview about the attacks. I admit that these experiences pale in comparison to losing close friends or relatives on that day. I appreciate the need of survivors to remember lost loved ones. But the media-generated collective national mourning on every anniversary of the attack is doing few people, including the survivors, any good.

When I worked as a volunteer crisis counselor, a professional grief therapist once gave me a briefing on counseling techniques to use when talking to relatives or friends of someone who died. Then she noted that grieving people go through several stages of anguish over a loss, the first of which is mental denial that the loved one has died. The therapist concluded that the only problem with the denial stage is that it doesn't last long enough. Denial is a built-in defense mechanism that prevents intense grief from becoming overwhelming and dangerous.

Obviously, the nation is long past the denial stage, but one can question the healthiness of dredging up endless footage of the 9/11 incident and having repeated collective remembrances presented by people who did not lose loved ones in the attacks. This national outpouring of grief gives the media something to do for a few days each year, but it is probably very hard for the survivors to get through.

The only ones benefiting from this "wear-it-on-your-sleeve" grief for the dead are the politicians and the monstrous terrorists who perpetrated the attacks. For example, President Bush was in New York on 9/11 to make political hay out of the remembrances. The president and his party – both sagging in the polls before an important mid-term election because of his administration's bungling of the Iraq War – are desperate to point out that they were in power when the 9/11 attack happened. The president and the Republicans want to exploit the public exhibition of collective grief because the only issue on which they poll better than Democrats is fighting terrorism..."

http://antiwar.com/eland/?articleid=9685

[electropop]

1. I heard that a new poll shows dems are now ahead on fighting terror

Heard it yesterday on C-Span, I think it was 33% think Dems are better, 31% say Pukes. The rest say both suck.