Disheartened at Michael Moore's live appearance tonight

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When a tragedy happens to a person or a group of people, in retrospect what they want to remember about those victims. Case in point: My father was junkie who died of cirrhosis of the liver and ofetn acted terribly and neglected my needs as a child because of his drug habit. After he died, my mother refused to hear a bad word about him. If I point out some terrible thing he did, she gets really angry. He was a saint to her and she's still in mourning ten years after he died. However, I'd rather remember him as a person who embodied both bad and good qualities. After all, he was just human, like everyone...but in my mother's eyes he has taken on a saintly glow after his death. She won't even concede that he was a junkie.

I think this kinda the same thing that happened to people after 9/11; their sense of judgement got a little screwy because of a major tragedy. Around March of 2002 I was getiing really tired of hearing about "heroes" invlolved in 9/11, as if the firefighters who lost their lives weren't just flesh and blood people, but somehow superhuman, blameless, holy creatures. We shouldn't forget that those who died in the attacks on the WTC were just there to do their jobs. There weren't the frontline of a new war. They didn't die "for their country," they died because a plane crashed into a building.

It really bothers me that Bush has made a number of speeches where he gets all teary-eyed about the passengers crashing the planes on purpose, in order to protect people on the ground. A half-century ago, Americans were aghast at the idea of suicide attacks -- our family is Japanese, and my father explained to me early on that an important difference between the fanatical loyalty of, say, kamikaze pilots, and being North American, is that Americans and Canadians wouldn't do this. Rather than dying for our families, we try to come home so we can live for them.

The FBI said this summer that the hijackers crashed those planes. I don't know if Bush has kept up his story, but it did send a disturbing message -- that any bunch of Americans off the street would (and should) fight as fanatically as indoctrinated "suiciders" (to use his term).

One of my grade-school classmates was married to the co-pilot on Flight 93. They had a baby daughter. I never met him, but I think she would have picked someone who would be thinking of saving the other passengers by regaining control of the plane, and coming home to his family. The phone transcripts I have read from the passengers don't say anything about crashing -- just about trying to overpower the hijackers.