Each Anniversary’s Replay of Video of the 11 September (2001) Terrorist Attack Is Psychologically and Spiritually Damaging — The President and First Lady’s Televised Moment of Silence Is a More Healing Way to Commemorate the Losses

© 2012 Peter Free

 

11 September 2012

 

 

Five points

 

(1) There are better ways to deal with loss than retraumatizing its sufferers.

 

(2) Desensitization techniques are misplaced, when dealing with evil.

 

(3) Wallowing in narcissistic, vicarious victimization is unattractive and spiritually childish.

 

(4) Interminable emphasis on American civilian terrorist-caused deaths misallocates our limited supply of caring in a way that cheats war’s equally deserving victims — including our troops and the collateral deaths that necessarily accompany military interventions.

 

(5) Stoking hatred skews our priorities in ways that cause disproportionate, and therefore destructive, over-reactions.

 

 

What prompted this essay

 

This morning, the eleventh anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attack in New York City, at least one of the news networks ran a very long video segment showing the attack.

 

The re-aired segment came immediately after the President and First Lady observed a moment of televised silence outside the White House.

 

The Commander in Chief’s moment of healing remembrance contrasted sharply with the scab-peeling excess that the video represented.

 

 

Point 1 — there are better ways to deal with loss than retraumatizing its sufferers

 

Cross-generational human wisdom counsels us to put deep pain behind us.

 

That is not the same as forgetting those who fell in untimely fashion.  But the prescription directs us not to subject ourselves to blow-by-blow reminders of horrors that wounded us.

 

Dwelling on pain is not a prescription for sound mental or physical health.

 

 

Point 2 — desensitization techniques are misplaced, when dealing with evil

 

With an adequate number of repetitions, people will become inured to the murderous insanity that the 9-11 video represents.  That does our humanity-preserving revulsion no good.

 

Note

 

From a medical perspective, desensitization has a place in helping people, who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.  But PTSD desensitization is patient-specific and must be carefully planned and supervised.

 

Indiscriminately re-airing the 9-11 video to America at large does not qualify on medical grounds.

 

 

Point 3 — wallowing in narcissistic, vicarious victimization is unattractive and spiritually childish

 

Nine-eleven families aside, Americans seem to like to think that our (mostly) vicarious suffering is more poignant than anyone else’s.

 

When one looks at the global history of terror objectively, other nations have had to tolerate noticeably worse circumstances than the United States.  There is a quality-of-life difference between one horrific strike and the day-to-day murderous drips that characterize other countries’ interminable experiences with terrorists.

 

Drama-queening 9-11 is nationally unbecoming.  Our childish self-indulgence probably elicits contempt abroad.  This disrespect encourages adversaries to overestimate their strength compared to ours.  Strategically, that is not a benefit.

 

 

Point 4 — interminable emphasis on American civilian, terrorist-caused deaths misallocates our limited supply of caring in a way that cheats war’s equally deserving victims — including our troops and the collateral deaths that necessarily accompany military interventions

 

Assailed beyond a certain point, we characteristically run out of empathy and actively expressed concern.

 

Because human caring has limits, the ritualized, over-the-top national whining that we do each year on 11 September cheats our troops out of the implemented support that they require from us right now.

 

Just days ago, Republican Party presidential nominee, Governor Mitt Romney, did not even mention the Afghanistan War in his convention address.

 

The two wars that we started after 9-11 have already cost 6,570 military deaths, as of this writing.

 

That figure, already significantly more than double the number of people we lost in the New York terrorist attack, does not include the tens of thousands of troops who have been maimed.  Nor does it count innocent foreign deaths.  Or the wider than necessary cultural resentments that our interventions have caused.

 

The President and First Lady’s televised moment of silence this morning was the most appropriate way to remind ourselves of what we’ve lost and where we should go from here.

 

Sometimes soul is best accessed in the absence of emotion-generating stimuli.

 

 

Point 5 — stoking hatred skews our priorities in ways that cause disproportionate, and therefore destructive, reactions

 

For most of us, it is impossible to watch the 9-11 attack video, without despising the men who caused it.

 

The poorly thought out and subsequently managed military interventions that the United States undertook after the attack were (at least partially) caused by too much emotion and too little thought.

 

Recreating these primal emotional conditions on each 9-11 anniversary is not advisable.  Hatred is not a good policy prompter.

 

Wise people understand that huge feelings are mind-blinding.

 

 

The moral? — quiet remembrance of 9-11 is where we should be now

 

Let’s stop stoking fear and reactive hatred.  Serially rebroadcasting the 9-11 video short-circuits wisdom and soul-depth.

 

Meditative silence is a better prescription.  Ritual should be healing.