Got this email forward yesterday…

LIGHTS ON…..9/11

PLEASE forward this email to everyone in your address book asking them to also forward it. Please join us on 9/11. We have over two weeks to get the word out all across this great land we love and call the United States of America . Let's see how powerful e-mail can be!

On Tuesday, September 11, 2007 everyone in the USA who will be driving a motor vehicle is asked to drive with their headlights on during daylight hours. Though no explanation is needed as to why we are commemorating September 11, we hope more importantly to pay respect to the victims of that day, show our nation's solidarity and show support for our men and women of the Armed Forces. You can help by sending this e-mail on to others!

REMEMBER!

LIGHTS ON…..9/11

So, we'll all commemorate 9/11 by doing something that has absolutely nothing to do with what happened or with anything traditionally considered to be a commemorative activity. That is, we will make up a brand new commemorative activity, one that actually happens to be required by law for truckers and motorcyclists, and for cars in many places, and that is also generally considered to be a good idea and is done by most people already anyway. Thus, it will be entirely unclear whether anyone observed to be engaging in the activity:

• is required by law to do so
• does it all the time anyway
• is doing it by accident, or
• is actually commemorating something.

Not to mention the fact that you can only do it if you own a car. Or the tragic irony of commemorating 9/11 through an activity that burns enormous amounts of fossil fuels, our crippling dependence on which is the root cause of the Middle East policies that angered the perpetrators of 9/11 to begin with.

It shouldn't be so easy.

Remember how you felt in 2001? Speechless and barely able to breathe due to the mind-numbing horror of what you were seeing? Then you spent the rest of the year furtively glancing upward as planes flew overhead, wondering if something else was about to be annihilated as part of the next wave in a massive campaign to make the United States look more like downtown Kabul. Does turning on your headlights account for that?

People are getting shot and blown up in Iraq and Afghanistan because of what happened on 9/11. Americans, Iraqis, British, military personnel, contractors, civilians, men, women, children… it's war, that's what happens. Still think turning on your headlights for a day is enough?

Here's an idea: at 8:46 am, everything stops. We pull our cars over. We turn off our computers and televisions. We hang up our telephones. We stop talking. And we maintain a dignified, respectful silence. We think about the lives that were lost in 9/11 and in the wars that have followed it, and the living people still affected by those losses. We consider the unity that we all felt in the days after 9/11, and the spirit that moved everyone to hang a flag outside their doors. And then, at 10:28 am, we begin our lives again.

Doesn't that seem a more fitting tribute than something you can do with a flick of your wrist?

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 8:46 am and is filed under News and politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.