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Remembering all the 9/11 victims downtown
By adamg on Sun, 09/10/2023 - 9:32pm
The St. Anthony Shrine on Arch Street downtown was wrapped today with the name of all the victims of 9/11, Anthony Castiglioni reports.
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doubt Jesuits or Paulists would do this
A tragedy isolated without the context of the 20+ years of bigger tragedies which followed it.
The Church is the Catholic Church. Catholic means universal not national.
A memorial mass would be good.
They used to do a 9/11 mass here
Maybe they still do? I worked a block a way for years and they did put up signs.
A little context, too: I don't know if you lived in Boston at the time but I knew very few people here who did not have at least one first or second degree connection with someone who died, escaped, or lived and worked in the impacted area. Two full planes of people, mostly business travelers, originated in Boston and some may have been affiliated with this shrine.That might have something to do with this memorial.
yes, I understand it more from that angle
I remember the day, the closure of all the offices and the empty MBTA later in the day. F-15s with a low roar in the sky in the days after.
I have second degree connections with those who died on 9/11 too. As I said a tragedy.
My first degree connection is with people who died in the wars.
"We" (the USA) directly and indirectly killed a lot more civilians than 9/11 in the years afterwards. At least hundreds of thousands.
I can't forget that context. Those people have mourning families too.
I agree
I could see the autoimmune reaction to the event happen in real time - polarization.
I remember saying that you can't spell QUAGMIRE without an I an R an A and a Q.
And it was all as horrifying as anyone not blinded by jingoism could forsee.
I'm not going to wade into the specifics of Catholic factions on this - way out of my league. What the church does is irrelevant to me so long as they stay out of the secular business of government. But I can see why this particular location memorializes the event and has for years.
Tell us something you grieve
We need to know so we can malign your feelings as well.
No, maybe you're right. Why mark the passing of any date related to an event X-years ago? We don't need Memorial or Veterans day either... And the 4th of July? How long are we going keep patting ourselves on the back over that stilly piece of parchment? And Christmas? Com'on! That was over two thousand years ago!
the analogy would be Pearl Harbor
Yes, I mourn those guys, and all the other Americans killed in WW II.
We killed a lot of civilians in WW II too. Firebombing and nuking cities.
In context, those civilian deaths in WW II look a lot more unavoidable and justifiable than the civilian deaths we caused after 9/11. Even counting Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I guess that's because the wars on Iraq (and Libya and Syria) were optional wars with venal motives and involved grossly disproportionate force over weak opponents. Afghanistan was more justified.
It's the victim-to-war criminal ratio.
Ah, Boston - where now the
Ah, Boston - where now the Arch Street Franciscans are too right-wing and nationalistic.
Uneffingbelievable.
Beau Geste
Thank you Saint Anthony's for remembering the innocents who lost their lives on 9-11.
One of the additional
One of the additional tragedies is that the list gets longer every year.
NYFD is now up to at least as many people who have died of the aftereffects of various exposures at Ground Zero in the 22 years since as firefighters who were killed the day of the attack.
The Other 9/11 Fifty Years Later
https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/pinochet-coup-50th-anniversary...
And then there are the victims of the response to 9/11
All of us. The loss of civil liberties in the US, the pointless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens, the continued war on an abstraction.
Yes, that's true, but ...
Is it not possible to just spend a moment or two (or let others spend a moment or two) mourning the loss of several thousand people at the hands of murderers?
I didn't know anybody who died on 9/11. But my sister worked in the Pentagon at the time, my brother saw one of the jets heading for the World Trade Center, my father's office was two blocks away and he, his wife and my brother lived in the part of Manhattan that was shut down as a giant crime scene/decontamination zone (my father spent a good part of the day trying to contact me because for some reason he got it in his head I might have been on one of the flights out of Logan). And one of the victims grew up basically right around the corner from us here in Roslindale.
So, yes, by all means, redouble your efforts to fight back against all the things that happened after 9/11. But let people grieve the loss of innocents that day as well.
It's both, though.
I don't want to minimize that people were directly affected by the attacks. But when I think of 9/11, my first response is shame in my country's response. The Patriot Act, the rolling out of increased surveillance, suspension of the right to trial, the hellish treatment of untried prisoners in Guantanamo Bay that continues to this very day, the war on Iraq -- these *also* directly affected people. They continue to hurt us.
When is the proper moment to mourn those things?
At this point...
I agree, reluctantly. At this point, I don't think we can separate them cleanly. And, it should be said the reason we can't separate them is because certain people appropriated a tragedy and used it as fuel for their agendas, and the country's shameful response came out of that.
All of us who were alive at the time and who knew people who died, in the air and on the ground, want their memories to be honored. The fact that there are so many of us makes it impossible to create a common vision of how that could be accomplished. But as much as it feels like whataboutism when people talk about the country's response in addition to remembering those who died, I remember that it wasn't those people who tarnished that remembrance. It was the people who used the occasion to sell cars and bank accounts and snacks and t-shirts and flags and football and military hardware. It was those who used a combination of mawkish sentimentalism, half-truths and outright lies to manipulate the public into accepting what happened after. It was those who saw the opportunity to advance a certain ideological agenda and found in the public reaction (that they had cynically manufactured) the ultimate bully club to brutalize any potential opposition.
9/11 was a horrible tragedy. The aftermath was worse.