The September 12th paradigm

I remember September 10th 2001.

Then, people hardly stood for the National Anthem or assumed the proper stance during sporting events. No soldiers repelled from the ceilings of ice rinks before the game. The league held no commemorative nights where the players wore partially or wholly camouflage jerseys or some color-coded ribbon to 'honor' heroes.' There were no color guard ceremonies or moments where the whole audience had to get up and salute 'our veterans.'

Dying for a specifically shaped, colored, and patterened piece of fabric that you call a synecdoche for all the things you hold dear, which happens to fall under the governance of that government that flies this fabric is a mistaken association happening when Joe America's ability to lift and repaint his pickup and court Mary America at their town's burger joint is somehow delivered onto us by Joe Soldier's 4-year tour of duty spent at the terminus of a military supply chain on a sand bagged hilltop in Afghanistan where he occasionally exchanges fire and launches mortar rounds at an adjacent hillside because doing that in some way is what kept a militarized Asian religious sect from conquering every aspect of what it is to be free and American, from the church steeple to the last slurp of that malt with Mary.