To the 3,025 people who died on September 11, 2001:

I'm sorry that you died for this. You worked hard, you came in early, you were just at your desk, you were just getting on a plane, you were just minding your own business, and you were killed for reasons that had nothing to do with you, nothing at all.

The spectacular, terrible moment of your death made us look up for a moment from our People magazines and our sitcoms and our trips to Walmart, and for one day we sat weeping in front of our televisions, or on our rooftops, watching in disbelief, mouths open, speechless except for the expletives we whispered when the towers collapsed in front of us, over and over, replayed in slow motion from a hundred different angles on the TV. We watched, helpless as you as you jumped from windows, holding hands as you burned, as you suffocated, as you suffered in fear and pain and panic. We could not believe what we were seeing that day, just as you surely could not have believed what was happening to you in those last moments of your life.

I'm sorry that your deaths have become an excuse. Your names have been cheapened, taken in vain over and over, to sell stickers and flags and cars and toilet paper, to justify imprisonment and torture and fear. You are an excuse for liberals to say "I told you so" and an excuse for conservatives to parade the flag and push a war that has nothing to do with you, or the people who killed you. The place where you died has become a sightseeing destination, happy tourists waving, smiling into a camera in front of the place where you last breathed, terrified, lungs full of smoke and dust.

We pick at the scab of our pain today, not the pain of your friends, your relatives, your survivors, who know what it is to have lost you, but our pain, the pain of watching others die in front of our eyes. We want to feel something too. We fetishize those moments we saw on television, fetishize that loss as meaningful and at the same time strip it of meaning by not understanding, not asking why it happened.

The television tells us to remember September 11th. Should we remember this each year, on this day, remember to re-live the horror and fear and shock as we listen to the eulogies and speeches and memorials? Or should we remember why this has all happened, and question why it happened, and determine how to stop it from happening again?