Where were you?

[TheHeadlessHorseman]

As we approach the 25th anniversary there are quite a few new documentaries being released. After I watched that trailer the recommended videos showed me some other trailers, some of them look interesting, and one said that they will have some new unseen footage.

It's important for our nation to reflect on the events of that day, not just for the people that witnessed it, but for the generation that is here in the aftermath, so that they know how it shaped the world they live in. I know that we will be having a moment of silence on that day at the restaurant to honor the lives that were lost that day.

[Murfreesboro]

That's beautiful and appropriate.

[TheHeadlessHorseman]

The 11th is going to be on a Friday this year, and the kids will be in their new school on that day. In their old school they always had a memorial ceremony on that day, well, if the 11th landed on a school day, so I hope their new school does something similar. But if they don't, I'll remind the kids to take a moment on that day.

[Murfreesboro]

I've never asked my husband if the public schools here acknowledge it. I bet they will this year, since it's the 25th anniversary.

[TheHeadlessHorseman]

My brother is 2 years younger than me but he had kids earlier than I did, they are in their late teens now, but when they were younger the schools around here didn't like to talk about 9/11 because they thought that the kids would be traumatized by it. But eventually the school board went through a staff change and they said they were now allowed to have a memorial ceremony in schools here.

I can understand why some schools don't want to talk about it because it's still a touchy subject to discuss with younger kids, but it's also a part of our history, and something that we should be teaching them about. I mean, just imagine if they didn't want to teach us about Pearl Harbor when we were growing up because they thought we couldn't handle it. Honestly, this kind of censorship of history, along with their inability to teach kids the basic skills that we learned, is making this generation too fragile.

On a side note, one of my employees recently pointed out to me that 9/11 is exactly 50 days from Halloween, I honestly didn't ever notice that before.

[Murfreesboro]

You are certainly right that too many young people are being trained to be fragile. I wonder if that is a consequence of the feminization of our public school system? I think women are generally more likely to coddle the young and men to challenge them. They need both, but maybe they're getting too much of one and not enough of the other.

Perhaps educators are also afraid of demonizing Muslims, who are growing more numerous in our population. But surely we can draw distinctions between terrorists and peaceful neighbors. When my second son was in high school, he asked a Muslim classmate why the peaceful ones didn't speak out more against the terrorists. The boy told him that people like him and his family were afraid of the terrorists, too. I guess the terrorists are prone to target those in their own community who don't really want to go along with them.

I'd never counted the days between 9/11 and Halloween, either.

[TheHeadlessHorseman]

I think the male way was too harsh, like throw your kid in the deep end of the pool and stand there watching if they have the balls to learn how to swim and save themselves.

But the female way is the opposite, like cover you with your blanket, then tell you to listen to some nature sounds while she does your homework for you, and then make you dinner. It's overprotective to a unreasonable degree.

Those are just general examples, but you get the picture. Most parents today go to one extreme or the other. I can't tell you how many times my wife and I witness both extremes of parenting, but we don't step in because it's not our place to. If people want to raise their kids to be sharks or morons, then let them.

The boy told him that people like him and his family were afraid of the terrorists, too.

This is true. Some of the Muslims that I know have told me that their religion teaches peace, but the extremists twist the meaning of the messages to match their point of view, and they will attack anybody that doesn't agree with them, even their own people.

I don't think that teaching history about 9/11 in any way vilifies every Muslim person out there, because when we discuss that history we make sure that they know that it was a specific group of people that committed the attacks, and they don't represent every single person from that culture.

It's like when we teach about the Nazi terror that Hitler unleashed on the world, we don't blame every German person for the decisions made by one guy, a very mentally disturbed individual that commanded his followers to commit genocide. Sure, some of them agreed with him, but most people just did what they were told to because their lives were on the line.

When I was in high school they made us read Hitler's Mein Kampf for history class, they didn't try to censor history and sugarcoat what a Nazi was, or tip toe around the Holocaust and act like it didn't happen, they wanted us to learn about our history. Good or bad, right or wrong, it's important that every generation learns the uncensored truth about our history.

[Murfreesboro]

The German/Nazi example is probably a good one. But my older son, who is fluent in German and lived over there for about seven months in college, tells me that the Germans don't talk about Nazism at all. It's rude to mention it, and certain books are unavailable to them. For example, I think Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich is not sold there (Speer of course was Hitler's Minister of Armanents, and he spent 20 years in prison for war crimes after WW2). Colin still has friends in Germany and visits them periodically. I think he plans to visit some friends there after he attends an academic conference in Portugal this Oct.

Sometime after 9/11 I actually read the Koran. Colin had a copy left over from a college history class, and I was tired of hearing oeople on tv tell me what that book said. So I read it myself. It is a very different book from what I expected. I'd expected it to be filled with cultural stories, like the OT, but it isn't. It has a lot of rules and refers to Biblical stories randomly, but not in such a way that you'd be able to follow them if you didn't already know them. It is not a book with narrative integrity. It just jumps around, so it's hard to follow. They have an odd view of Jesus, at least to me. They forcefully deny that Jesus was the son of God, but they still think he was supernatural, the son of Mary and an angel. And they say he did not die on the cross, that a facsimile of him died on the cross and he was snatched up to heaven. I could better understand the Jewish attitude toward Jesus, that he was just a man, a popular rabbi. It seemed to me that the Muslims have him in kind of a halfway house between human and divine. Anyway, I think everybody should read the Koran, if only because (I think) it makes you appreciate the Bible more by contrast.

[TheHeadlessHorseman]

I can understand why German people wouldn't want to discuss that portion of their history, because most of them are ashamed of it. But I think that it's still important for the younger people there to be aware of their history, if for no other reason than to teach them that there are certain periods in history that should never be repeated. So while it's considered rude to discuss it, by outright suppressing that history they are cheating modern generations out of learning some valuable lessons.

[Murfreesboro]

I agree with you about that. And they must teach their kids something about WW2. I just don't know what it is.