Friday, September 10, 2004
Our long national nightmare is over: Apple Day Has Returned
I can't tell if this article is incredibly bitter or incredibly stupid:
Ms. Leipold then excused herself as she had an appointment with a reporter from the national news weekly The Onion.
Meanwhile, Gov. Pawlenty has declared Sept. 11th to be "Patriot Day," as the dozens of more appropriate monikers were apparently already in use. I suppose he knew that his little Orwellian flourish would go unnoticed as no one will ever refer to September 11th as anything other than "September 11th," or "nine-eleven," or possibly as "the day the music died."
But the idea that suburbanites in the Midwest no longer care in any personal way about 9/11 is nothing shocking. I'm sure this article could have been published in 2003 or even 2002, had this year not been the first that September 11th falls on a weekend. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I feel that human interest stories should either be about animals or contain something resembling real news. For example, they could have figured out exactly how long it took before people stopped giving a shit, beyond the requisite utterance "If we don't eat pie (or get married, become a woman, sit around watching college football, undermine the social safety net, completely ignore terrorism, etc.), the terrorists have won." That would have the added bonus of giving the newsroom a new topic for the office betting pool.
|
"We're sensitive to what happened three years ago, but we also want to get back to living as normally as possible -- and for us, having Apple Day the Saturday after Labor Day is normal," LaVerna Leipold, co-chairwoman of the event, said Thursday.
"We're not dishonoring anyone. We'll still be thinking about the people that died. But isn't it time to move on? Haven't the terrorists taken enough away already?"
Ms. Leipold then excused herself as she had an appointment with a reporter from the national news weekly The Onion.
Meanwhile, Gov. Pawlenty has declared Sept. 11th to be "Patriot Day," as the dozens of more appropriate monikers were apparently already in use. I suppose he knew that his little Orwellian flourish would go unnoticed as no one will ever refer to September 11th as anything other than "September 11th," or "nine-eleven," or possibly as "the day the music died."
But the idea that suburbanites in the Midwest no longer care in any personal way about 9/11 is nothing shocking. I'm sure this article could have been published in 2003 or even 2002, had this year not been the first that September 11th falls on a weekend. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I feel that human interest stories should either be about animals or contain something resembling real news. For example, they could have figured out exactly how long it took before people stopped giving a shit, beyond the requisite utterance "If we don't eat pie (or get married, become a woman, sit around watching college football, undermine the social safety net, completely ignore terrorism, etc.), the terrorists have won." That would have the added bonus of giving the newsroom a new topic for the office betting pool.
|
