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It's Time To Scale Back 9/11 Events, Some Say

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By N.R. KLEINFIELD, The New York Times

Published: September 2, 2007

Again it comes, for the sixth time now - 2,191 days after that awful morning - falling for the first time on a Tuesday, the same day of the week.

Again there will be the public tributes, the tightly scripted memorial events, the reflex news coverage, the souvenir peddlers.

Is all of it necessary, at the same decibel level - still?

Each year, murmuring about Sept. 11 fatigue arises, a weariness of reliving a day that everyone wishes had never happened. It began before the first anniversary of the terrorist attack. By now, though, many people feel that the collective commemorations, publicly staged, are excessive and vacant, even annoying.

'I may sound callous, but doesn't grieving have a shelf life?' said Charlene Correia, 57, a nursing supervisor from Acushnet, Mass. 'We're very sorry and mournful that people died, but there are living people. Let's wind it down.'

Some people prefer to see things condensed to perhaps a moment of silence that morning and an end to the rituals like the long recitation of the names of the dead at ground zero.

Many others, however, bristle at such talk, especially those who lost relatives on that day.

'The idea of scaling back just seems so offensive to me when you think of the monumental nature of that tragedy,' said Anita LaFond Korsonsky, whose sister Jeanette LaFond-Menichino died in the World Trade Center. 'If you're tired of it, don't attend it; turn off your TV or leave town. To say six years is enough, it's not. I don't know what is enough.'

'Commemoration aims to simplify, but life as it's lived and feelings as they're felt are never simple,' said John Bodnar, a professor of history at Indiana University.

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