There are all those signs and sayings...Never Forget. We will never forget. In memory of.... Never forget 9/11. Never Forget WTC.
Well I almost did forget. I woke up Saturday morning and just went about my day. I went to my computer to continue my work on my essay on Kubla Khan by Coleridge. I proceeded to cuss at my computer because Coleridge was on opium and I am not, and I am not convinced to fully write an essay on that poem one needs to also be on opium.
I then put on a DVD for some background noise and my day was just like any other day. It was not until I went though a drive through to get a diet coke that I saw a flag at half mass that I was reminded what the day was. It was September 11 and I forgot about it. Did this make me a bad person?
Three years prior I sat in front of the television most of the day completely void of all thought and emotion, not because I was heartless but because I was in shock. For an entire day I did not know if my uncle or a good friend of mine were ok and I just could not comprehend what was going on.
I went to New York a week after the attacks and even saw the aftermath of ground zero. I could smell the decay in the air and felt the eerie death that hung in the air all around me. Three years later, I have forgotten. So has most everyone else.
No one is any different. People are still in pain. People are still divided and in fact they are probably even more so. I remember after the attacks artists went on the air saying how fighting was just not worth it; hate was just stupid. We still hate. The world is not "united against terror" or even united together. Everyone still hates everyone else except those they never hated to begin with. Maybe hate is too strong of a word, but there is defiantly a lot of judgments and disliking and anyone who says they judge no one is lying. It is human nature and I wonder how much of it is really healthy.
An ex friend of mine (this is partly why he is an ex friend of mine) claims the way to get rid of terrorists is to bomb the whole country where he lives. Who cares if the babies die, it would teach them a lesson, he says. They would never attack us again, he says. Terrorists would stop right there, he says. The first thought that went through my head was that the reason he said this was because of the social conditioning of the country he originates from. Judgment.

I have no doubt people judge me: friends, co- workers, and passerbies. What do they see? Do they see a regular American girl? A Jewish American Princess? There are so many labels I have heard when one has talked about me; I venture to guess it just makes it easier.

Regardless, whatever I am, I forgot what Saturday was. It made me feel guilty for a minute. All these people were mourning and I was stressing over Kubla Khan because I need to be the best. I only felt guilty for a minute. It was like a flash of insight into my head and I went straight back into my emotionless void of existence. Whether this was the way I cope or just the way I am. I guess a label would tell me that.