United States Celebrates Twenty Years of Never Forgetting

 

American life mattered a lot to the people who then sent thousands of US soldiers to die in places completely unconnected to this event.

(United States of America) This week marks twenty years since the largest terrorist attack on US soil. The country's "Global War on Terror" has killed an estimated 800,000 people at this point, displacing and injuring even more. As troops pulled out of Afghanistan this past August, many Americans remembered that they were never going to forget.

"Yeah, I was working at Chili's that day," said Fabian Manning. "I remember it was weird because we didn't close, but everyone was just watching the TV as stuff went crazy all over the place. A lot's different now, I mean, I don't work at Chili's anymore; I'm at TGIFriday's. I moved from Cincinnati to Cleveland. I mean, I remember September 11th. A lot of these kids, they just don't know. Like, yeah, it changed things. That's what we're supposed to remember, right?"

Several people had trouble what it was, exactly, that they were supposed to be remembering.

"I mean, like, a lot of people died that day, right?" said Emma Cleery. "Like, if we don't remember them, then, poof, they just completely stop existing. We've got to remember them. Never forget, right?"

"I feel like we were supposed to use it as like a grudge," commented Lee Acosta. "Like, never forget! You know? People did this to us; we can't just forget about it. We have to make the bad guys feel the pain, right? Well, Obama got Osama, so we're good now right?"

"We were supposed to remember what things were like beforehand. Like how dumb we were, thinking that the world just loved us and was going to let us be. No, we have to remember that we can be attacked at any time. We have to be completely vigilant and ready to kill as many people as possible necessary to maintain our way of life," wrote Alfred Bonham. "It's a promise. We won't forget because we won't get caught with our pants down again. Never again."

"Isn't it like we should make our losses mean something? How about we learn from this and try to create a world where the geopolitics aren't amenable to something like this happening ever again?" said Georgia Burnhardt. "No? We're just going to let stuff keep happening like this? Good grief. It's not like we never forgot. We never even acknowledged."

Meanwhile, terrorist training camps and extremist groups found that their rooms were just the way they left them when they headed into the mountains of eastern Afghanistan to wait out the US occupation that, despite excruciating losses of human life and billions of hours of effort invested, was unable to create a stable enough government to fend off the fighters it had once armed and supported (as recently as last month.)