On the morning of September 11th, 2001, my wife and I were talking with our neighbors as we all waited at a bus stop to see our children off to school. I had just started becoming interested in amateur astronomy, so I was chatting a bit about it. One of our neighbors remarked that a local astronomy group often met on a nearby hill. She claimed that the hill was so high and the view so unobstructed that, on a clear day, from there in central Connecticut, one could see the World Trade Center towers. I never got the chance to verify her claim.

A few towns over from where we lived, there was a little store that puzzled me ever since I first saw it as a teenager. The store sold flags and flag accessories. I had no idea how it stayed in business: I drove by that store for years and never saw a single customer. But, a few days after 9/11, that store had a long line of customers waiting to get in.

My wife, who had lost a childhood friend in the attack, and who was active in the American Legion Auxiliary for most of her life, was heartened at the sudden patriotic display. I warned her then that it wasn’t going to last, that the Americans who hate this country would never allow it to last. And it wasn’t too long afterward that I noticed that, during any public display of patriotism and remembrance, any Ruling Class liberal present in the crowd would start to bristle. And soon after that, it became uncouth to show too many pictures of the attack, and then to show any at all.

In 2014, my wife suggested that we go to the 9/11 Memorial so she could pay respect to her friend before we finally moved away to Wyoming. I did not want to go: I remembered too well the bristling elites and so suspected what I might find there. However, going was something that we had to do. And once there, I found that my expectations were surpassed. I have very mixed thoughts about the memorial itself, suffice it to say that I found it soul-crushing. But that’s not what surpassed my expectations. The crowd did that. More often than I care to remember, I saw small groups of people, at the 9/11 memorial, smiling and laughing while posing for a selfie.

In less than thirteen years, our society went from waiting in line to buy a flag to snapping selfies on the site of a mass grave.

You might think that a harsh statement, but I don’t. Since moving to Wyoming, I’ve noticed that the further you go from the New York Tri-State area, the less import the 9/11 attacks carry. And that is to be expected. But, let me tell you: as someone who was offered but declined an IT position at the WTC in the late 90’s, as someone who drove around NYC and into northern New Jersey so I could see first-hand the smoking hole in the skyline, as someone who lived in a town where almost everyone was touched in some way by the attack, as someone who had friends who worked in NYC on that very day, as someone whose wife lost a friend in the towers, as someone who had to calm the fears of an eleven year old son, as someone who was chatting idly about the towers that very morning – that statement might not be harsh enough.

In two days, we will mark the fifteenth anniversary of that attack. And 9/11 is now called Patriot Day. I can’t help but suspect that even the official naming of the day is a subtle attempt to dull the import of it – the name Pearl Harbor Day still carries import. However, regardless of the name, the day deserves a special deference, one which it does not currently have and if left to our elites probably never will have. I recently wrote in Ricochet on the importance of holidays, on how, if we are to win the culture war, we have to counteract leftist contrivances such as Labor Day and Earth Day by observing holidays of our own. And I can not think of a holiday which better fits that description than 9/11.

UPDATE – 09/10 02:34 MT – After returning from work this morning, I saw an article posted in the Daily Mail UK about people taking selfies at the 9/11 Memorial. One person even brought a blow-up doll.