9/11: Get the fuck over it.

I wouldn't presume to say anything to people who actually lost loved ones on that day, but for the rest of us, seriously--ya'll motherfuckers need to suck it the fuck up. Actually, I would contend that people who lost loved ones (like these women) are actually much more likely to have processed the events in a healthy matter, because they have an obvious, direct, personal stake in it. Whereas the rest of us...? It's the difference between Freud's concepts of "mourning" and "melancholia"--with the former, you know what you've lost and it hurts but you're able to work through it and open yourself up again to further experience; whereas with the latter, you can't really make sense of what you've lost, and so you can't move on; you just endlessly reiterate your grief. This is obviously not healthy, especially since in this case the feeling manifests itself as a combination of extreme xenophobia and a feeling of perpetual victimhood.

This shock that we feel is understandable to an extent, since compared to most countries, we haven't experienced much seemingly-inexplicable, alien violence; and when we do it clashes with our image of ourselves as the most awesome, wonderfulest country EVAH. Nonetheless, after a time wallowing endlessly in self-pity just feels grotesque, especially under the circumstances: we repaid the deaths of three thousand innocents by killing hundreds of thousands of innocents. And somehow, we're still supposed to have the right and how-dare-you-question-it to see ourselves as innocent victims, pure-as-the-driven-snow? Does not compute.