Here’s Jon Stewart Struggling To Do The Daily Show On Sept 11th, 2001
Time moves on, people move on, and all this becomes history. It becomes woven into the fabric of yesterday, that great collective tapestry that future generations come to know.
I’m posting this late (11:20pm) after a long day full of personal nonsense. Last year I posted this on September 11th. The new site format has now made the first bit difficult to read but today I’ve thought about how I felt last year posting it. A friend working for the government to combat (read: fight with everything she had) extremists who kill women and children, behead prisoners, had taken her own life just two weeks prior. I wish you could have met her. She had this stunning kindness about her that belied her chosen profession. She would have helped anyone that asked for it. She looked for people with open but hidden hearts. She had a way of sniffing them out. Zero time for bullshit.
Today is hard for me. 9/11 is the nexus of a lot of decisions that I made which ultimately determined the direction of relationships that were dear that I lost. I say that not to groan about me but to say that I know that this is even more the case for thousands of others who live on in the shadow of that crossroads, that grand deviation. People in NYC are still fighting to get medical benefits after being poisoned by the dust from the towers that was in the air and the water. Mothers and fathers still cry today and widows and widowers still weep. I’m blessed, no one I know died.
Look, eventually 9/11 will be a holiday. Eventually it will be renamed “day of remembrance” or some such and our children will have it off from school and they’ll cheer for that privilege and be glad to stay home and do whatever kids in that year do. But that inevitability begs for a second of reflection now. It begs for us to take stock and notice that, like our grandparents and parents, we live in a time where something awful has happened and that can’t be zeroed out by a holiday, what this will all become. Time moves on, people move on, and all this becomes history. It becomes woven into the fabric of yesterday, that great collective tapestry that future generations come to know. Take it seriously.