I wanted to bake an American Flag Cake...
...for 9/11, but this will have to do.
I felt a little weird reading all of the 9/11 blog entries. I know that for better but mostly for worse, 9/11 has become this crazy cultural icon. Over the summer, some of my students from NYC talked about how it was upsetting that 9/11 and so-called "love" for NYC was being used as an excuse to support a president and a political agenda that was seriously hurtful to the people of New York and American cities in general. It's as if the perspectives of those who did not live in the tragedy, did not lose anyone to the tragedy and did not even hear any real first-person's perspective on the tragedy except for the canned media representations believe that their living room interpretation of 9/11 is more important than that of those who actually hard to work to get through the tragedy.
One of the folks at America Hates Us (which is awesome from the title to each grain of content) relates their experience of coming through 9/11 and the aftermath as the date comes again each year:
"Please Leave Us Alone"
I felt a little weird reading all of the 9/11 blog entries. I know that for better but mostly for worse, 9/11 has become this crazy cultural icon. Over the summer, some of my students from NYC talked about how it was upsetting that 9/11 and so-called "love" for NYC was being used as an excuse to support a president and a political agenda that was seriously hurtful to the people of New York and American cities in general. It's as if the perspectives of those who did not live in the tragedy, did not lose anyone to the tragedy and did not even hear any real first-person's perspective on the tragedy except for the canned media representations believe that their living room interpretation of 9/11 is more important than that of those who actually hard to work to get through the tragedy.
One of the folks at America Hates Us (which is awesome from the title to each grain of content) relates their experience of coming through 9/11 and the aftermath as the date comes again each year:
"Please Leave Us Alone"
posted by Xian Franzinger Barrett at 2:27 PM
1 Comments:
Xian,
Thank you for the link and for your kind words.
Your students are right, and theirs is a point I didn't really address in my post. We see now a lot of 9/11 commemoration things from people who "love" New York and "visit often." I would like to be more kindly inclined towards these expressions, but they almost always seem to be referring to some imaginary, sanitized and commodified New York, not the city its residents know.
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