How is this healthy?

I'm probably going to be considered unpatriotic or an insensitive or even...gasp...a traitor, but I'm not a huge fan of all these remembrances.

Say a mother lost her son to a horrible auto accident that someone happened to catch on video and every year on the anniversary of his death she put flowers at the site of his death with a sign that said, "Never Forget." All day long she watches the video of her son's last moments and weeps. All day long. Eight years later she's still doing this. No one would consider this a healthy way to get over her grief.

How can she get over her grief if she re-animates it every year? How can a wound heal if you keep taking off the bandage and prying the skin apart?

So why is it that when we do this as a nation it's patriotic? How can dredging up the videos of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers and the hours that pass afterwards heal us or make us stronger as a people? Why all the ceremonies and pain-filled remembrances of the day?

We can remember them without remembering it.

I just think there must be a healthier way to do this without making 9/11 a day of cameras shoved into the faces of people who lost loved ones, the re-showing ad nauseum of the horrific event, and speeches designed to inflame us against other countries or religions and make us feel superior in our grief.

No one is ever likely to forget. We have this generation of people who lived through it. You don't forget just because it isn't brought out of the closet once a year. I doubt anyone alive in the U.S. ever could forget it, even if they wanted to. And for subsequent generations, there will be history books and grandparents and, heaven forbid, movies made about it. In time it will be another horrible thing that happened to the United States, just like Pearl Harbor or the Hindenburg, as it should be.

I don't know...do other countries do this? Or do they grieve and move on? I think that's the healthier option. It's not about forgetting, it's about not shoving it in everyone's faces every year.

Don't forget them, but don't forget all the other people who have been lost to disease or accidents or by the hand of another human being. Remember them for who they were, not for how they died.