A weird human proclivity

That would be anniversaries. It seems to be close to a cultural universal that people mark calendar dates that coincide with significant events that happened on the same date in some past year. When the number of years happens to be a multiple of ten, we make an even bigger deal out of it. If you think about it, this doesn ' t make any sense. The importance of the event is its relevance, if any, to whatever is going on at this moment, not the calendar date on which it happened. (That goes for my birthday, BTW.)So anyway, today we ' re obliged to talk about the Sept. 11 2001 attack. It is quite relevant to stuff that ' s going on now, but it already was; we didn ' t need the coincidence of the calendar to make it so. If you ' re old enough to have had some political consciousness, or I should say some degree of sophistication, you know that the country went nuts. It was impermissible to try to say anything about why people would do this. Trying to understand or explain it was shouted down as excusing or justifying it. We weren ' t supposed to understand it, evil is ineffable. We also were not allowed to question what the Cheney administration said or did in response to it, or ostensibly in response. Osama bin Laden was in fact the best friend George W. Bush ever had. On Sept. 10, his approval was below water and he was widely perceived (quite correctly) as an idiot. When the attack happened, his approval rating shot up overnight to 90%. Truth! Even though he had been warn...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs