The U.S. Endured, Street Photo, Portland, Oregon
The image was taken on the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The newspaper headline reads, “9/11: Through fear and grief, the U.S. endured.” The Epoch Times seems to imply that we’ve reached some terminal point in our grief and suffering. As if all our struggles—as a nation and as individuals, war-related or not—had subsided once that decade of deprivation, war and humiliation (for ourselves and our ‘enemies’) had passed. The Epoch Times should tell the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It’s over. You can come home now. It’s all good from here on out.
And someone should tell the Iraqis. Who have endured—those still living, I mean.
I like Rob Spegiel’s take on it best. Spegiel is editor-in-chief of The Onion. In a September 2002 interview in the American Review of Journalism, he says, “I think it kind of strips away a person’s humanity if you present people as these robots of bravery who automatically rise to the occasion, when you Christopher Reeve-ize everybody…. It just oversimplifies the full range of emotions you work through when you’re confronting death and disease.”
Satirical, absurd and screamingly funny, The Onion might be the most accurate purveyor of truth in the media. A fine example: “Loved Ones Recall Local Man’s Cowardly Battle With Cancer.” Doesn’t this (the following paragraph, from the story), seem like a brutally honest portrait of how we usually face pain and suffering?
“Right then and there, faced with the prospect of a life-threatening disease, the 34-year-old Florissant, MO, husband and father of three drew a deep breath and made a firm resolution to himself: I am not going to fight this. I am a dead man.”
An Onion headline that seems to hit closer to home: “Remembering 9/11 A Pleasure For Nation Compared To Remembering Past 10 Years.”