Well, I definitely ran into a couple of block parties today...but no one's got their flags out, the library wasn't closed, and in general people regard the bombastic notion of a day when !!everyone's an american, stand proud beneath the stars and stripes, sing 'America the Beautiful' because we can't get the anthem changed even though we don't like it anymore!! ...with apprehension.
And, honestly, Americans like to forget. I have no personal connection to what happened on 9/11/2001, so I'm not going to go into what I think of it, but people do shit as normal now. It's not even been ten years and we're back to whatever...well, how long did it take before Memorial Day became more about barbecues and sales? How long before we see ads for Patriot Day sales or little trinkets you can buy for your visiting foreign relatives?
The fact is, the only successful holidays in America are the saccharine ones. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Labor Day--there's a lot of feel-good there, and that's about all this country wants. I know people talk of crumbling empire in terms of the economy and the way the future workforce is trained for (magazine) sales and nothing else, but really it's going bad from the inside out, because at some point we're going to end up with a lot of touchy-feely slackers who don't think through stuff very far.
Of course, the thinkers have always been the minority (and irritating pretentious elite, cough cough shut up)...but, knowing of this trend, how come no one's doing anything to stop it? Or maybe there's nothing they can do.
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