My wife and I could not agree on which house we were living in on the day that the towers fell. She says it was the yellow house we're in now. I say it was the red house we were in then. One of us is correct. Both of us are being truthful.
Every time I hear the acronym 'WMD' I screw up my face. I try to grant Americans the slack I cut my wife because I know many of us try harder to be correct and precise. For the rest, there is an emotional truth which must be reckoned with. It is difficult to care enough, across the many lines in our society, to bring others' perceptions in line with facts and the complex understanding that responsible parties must have while the rest of us listen to the radio, watch television or otherwise passively consume information tangential to reality. Getting to the bottom of things for its own sake can be immensely rewarding, but it is rarely a passion to be shared in politics. People would rather hew to their emotional truths.
Perhaps that's all we can do. Or perhaps it is the natural inclination of people who are not in command of the facts. Soldiers, inevitably will come home. Their willingness to tell their own emotional truths will be egged on by all sorts of seductions. "Tell us how you hated it over there." "Tell us how badly they needed you over there."
I remember when some concerned citizens got it in their heads that a statue to firefighters should be cast in bronze in remembrance of the day that the towers fell. It got ugly. Somebody somewhere convinced somebody else that white faces alone could not represent the nation's collective sorrow over the tragedy, and therefore some color would have to be included. Such are the politics of hero-making and symbol-making. All for the purposes of memory.
Memories are useful in that way. They anchor us to a moment, they solidify an idea, they become used again and again as a reference for some other use. The problem with memories and histories is... well, every day we get more of them whether we like it or not. The more history we get, the less appropriate the rest of history becomes. The more people remember something they didn't encounter first hand, the more it gets subjected to their emotional truth. Such is the inherent difficulty with nationalism and all such constructs of fidelity.
There are still people asking whether or not airplane fuel can burn hot enough to melt steel. There are still folks who believe all the Jews in the towers were alerted beforehand. People believe what they like, but the rest of us are not under any obligation to correct them. We should merely be correct and act accordingly. Those who believe in foolishness will have to walk off their own cliffs. It is not our duty to push them.
I'm not looking forward to calls for solemnity. We all know what we know. I've read about six books in six years, God knows how many articles and blogposts. And I listen to David Petraeus repeat himself and offer kindly to avail various Congressmen to facts about Iraq. People will still abstract to something that 'rings true', but is not the whole truth. We all have to learn how to deal with that instead of trying to force a more 'reasonable' abstract upon ourselves.
So close your eyes and imagine. Unless you were there, that's the best thing you can do. Walk according to your faith.
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