This is the obligatory 9/11 post that nearly every American blogger feels compelled to make on this anniversary.

I’m not being cynical, although certainly it would be easy. Simply, every year, we are innundated with memorials to this tragedy, calling on our patriotism and sentimentality to remember the thousands of people who died that day. It is not hard to spin that into a critical analysis of hubris, insincerity, and willful ignorance. After all, thousands of people die every day, not only here in the states but all over the world. What makes those deaths more precious than any other?

Nothing.

Because EVERY death is precious.

I think sometimes too many people who post blogs on 9/11 go out of their way to make special saints of the people who died that day. I hate posting on 9/11 because I don’t want to play into that false sentimentality; every death is tragic, and that should be the point.

Remembering 9/11 for me is not about where I was when the towers fell, or even about too much about the victims. I mourn them, and I am (still) angry at the violent manner of their deaths. But to me it is about all of us: the survivors, the memory-bearers, and the mourners as well as the dead.

I think the value of remembering 9/11 is that it puts death in our way. It makes us remember, as a nation, that people die. We can’t escape it, for strangers or loved ones: any whim of fate, or insane murderer, can plow death through our ranks.

Remembering 9/11 should not be about us coming together as a nation, but about us coming together as family.

We are all human beings, with frailties and broken hearts and numbered days.

We are all in this together.