For those people remembering 9/11 today, the people who will never forget, what are you not forgetting? I think we all need to ask ourselves that question.

First, of course, we need not to forgot the innocent people who were killed in the event and the people who died trying to save them. It was tragic. In addition to honoring the memory of our fallen brothers, we need to try to remember a little bit further, not just what we consciously thought, but how we felt, the reasons that we felt this way, and what happened next.

As I conjure up these ten year old memories now, what I remember most vividly were two airplanes hitting the twin towers and this image being repeatedly driven into my brain. There is no way I will ever be able to forget that image because I saw it thousands and thousands of times, so I believe it's a little redundant to say we'll never forget. Of course, we won't.

I remember people jumping out of windows. I remember being scared shitless and vulnerable. I was 17 and it was the first time that I realized that this illusion of living in the strongest country in the world was, in fact just that, an illusion . And this feeling of superiority that was ingrained for years by my parents, by my media, by my schooling was wiped away.

9/11 aroused our dormant patriotism, yes, which I believe is what you are remembering, too, a feeling of nostalgia for a oneness, a nation coming together over the most horrific thing we had ever seen in our lives. We didn't know what else to do. We had to rely on each other because we were so shitting scared. And it felt good.

But do you remember what that patriotism led to? Do you remember how our government used that patriotism? Two wars that are still being fought today and many more lives, including Americans, lost, all at the expense of the American taxpayer, don't forget, while making a few war profiteers richer.

And who was this enemy? This Osama Bin Laden. This terrorist? Did he really exist anywhere tangible or just on the evening news when they would show clips of someone we were told was our enemy who said evil things, or so we were told on some indescriptive scroll on the bottom of the TV screen. We salivated at the Hate and at our Goldstein, the enemy to our ways, to the beautiful American way of freedom. And when we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, we cheered because it was the only way we could fill the emptiness that was left by 9/11. We had to regain that superiority that we lost. And we trusted our government; we had to. We all shared an enemy.

It was a year before Osama Bin Ladin came out and laid claim for the attacks. But to us without a doubt it was him, and we knew this a short time later. Isn't that weird? I don't remember waiting a year wondering who did it.

And the word terrorist, now that, is a strong word, though extremely loose in its application. What happens when the government starts doing something that's legitimately wrong and you want to fight against it?

So will it make us terrorists if we demonstrate a true concern, whenever the time may arise? In their eyes, maybe it will, the discretion of the U.S. government is a funny thing.

I don't know whether today we are on a yellow defcon flag of terror alert 7 because I am not there. And it's taken me a few years standing outside of my homeland to realize fully how ridiculous it all really is. But it's a good country and we need to keep it that way. As good warm blooded Americans it is our responsibility to pose these questions to ourselves, question the environment that surrounds us, and fuck our girlfriends with our boners. Because if we don't do that, then we are not informed, and a public that doesn't question, is a public that is taken advantage of. Just keep a boner for your girlfriends and for America. Just make sure you know why you have a boner.