Today is my youngest daughter’s first birthday party. It is also of course the ninth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.
I have taken a great deal of flack for hosting her party today. Some tell me it’s disrespectful, others tell me it’s a just a day & who cares. Really it was just the only day both my husband & I had off but the situation has left me with a great deal of guilt.
9/11 is a funny sort of day. While other tragic events have become footnotes in history books, 9/11 still haunts us. The anniversaries of Pearl Harbour, Hiroshima, & even the Oklahoma City Bombing have been reduced to photos in a text book, a fact to help us answer questions on Jeopardy. The loss of life, the stories are all lost & we continue to remove ourselves from the sorrow that our fellow man felt on those days.
I guess I’m glad I feel guilty because it means I still care about the events of that day. I think we should always feel a little guilty because it helps remind us how lucky we are to be here & to share in moments like birthday parties, video games, a friendly laugh or a romantic moment with one’s significant other. By having that one second of empathy, we can keep the memory fresh in our minds. No one deserves to have their legacy relegated to a glossy page in a textbook or a Trivial Pursuit answer card. Let’s not allow another tragedy to become a footnote. Let us always feel A little pang before we celebrate so we can remember to remember.
The Misadventures of MHC 
It’s not like the 11th of September became No Fun Day. That means the terrorists win!
Heya MH, neato blog 🙂 I started on this long rant in reponse to your post, but it sounded super pretentious and over-complicated. Simply put, I don’t think that you should feel guilty for having baby’s b-day party on the 11th of September. If you were having a Quran-burning party, maaayyybe? If anything were to be “worthy” enough to celebrate on such a momentous day, it should certainly be the birth of a child.
By 9:00 last night I was on board to being completely trashed at a friend’s b-day party, and our jubilation had nothing to do whatsoever with September 11th. It was a celebration dedicated to the existence of a good person, and luckily our biggest worry was how bad our hangover would be in the morning. Call me insensitive or call me realistic, judgemental or perhaps reasonable, but the thought that I should stay home just because it was “9/11” did not enter my mind.
If we were to look back at history at all the bummer days there ever were, we would be mourning constantly. Our days would be haunted with the cries of “Who goes out drinking on the days of the Bombing of Dresden, really now.” “William Butler Yeats died on this day in 1939, how dare you frolic in the grass like that!”
Things could be so much worse; live in the moment!