This week will mark the sixth anniversary of 9/11. For some, this will be another heart-breaking reminder of a lost loved one. For others, this year’s September 11th will be a fatiguing irritant. After six years, perhaps it is appropriate—if it was ever inappropriate—to ask how much tribute will be enough.

This question is finally beginning to emerge, as demonstrated by N. R. Kleinfield’s recent piece in the 2 Sept 2007 edition of the New York Times. Kleinfield quotes from individuals on either side of this debate: those who lost loved ones and those who did not, those who demand remembrance and those who are weary of it. This plurality does not allow Kleinfield to come to any consensus, but it does underline an important reality about 9/11—many of us were not personally touched by the event. As citizens, we all watched the footage and were shocked to see what appeared to be a scene from a summer blockbuster come crashing down into our televisions. But six years later, after the shock and the fear and the anxiety has passed, how many of us truly have something to grieve this week? Don’t take me the wrong way—I would never presume to tell someone personally touched by 9/11 how to grieve, any more than I would tell a child who has lost his mother to breast cancer what sort of mourning is appropriate. But neither would I mourn alongside him. To do so would be a hypocritical affront to his honest loss, a grotesque posture that could only serve to insult his sadness by pretending to share in it. And, for the same reason, those of us who escaped 9/11 intact should respectfully decline to play at the deep and abiding loss of those who actually did lose something of consequence that day. Mourning 9/11 as a “national tragedy” appropriates the grief of those who experienced a personal loss in an event that cannot be seen as a tragedy in the Aristotelian sense, but rather a senseless, catastrophic intrusion into their lives.

This week will mark the sixth anniversary of 9/11. For some, this will be another heart-breaking reminder of a lost loved one. For others, this year’s September 11th will be a fatiguing irritant.

But while the respect due to those who grieve is cause enough to put away our national sackcloth and ashes, there is another, still more pressing reason. The national fetishizing of 9/11 has skewed our perspective on this event in dangerous ways. Just under 3,000 people, mostly Americans, died in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. By way of comparison, here are some other mortality figures from 2001:

These statistics, taken from the CDC’s website, help to put 9/11 into dramatic perspective. These are mortality statistics from just one year; domestic terrorism, on the other hand, accounts for approximately 3,000 American deaths in the last ten years, and even if we go further back to add the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 and the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, we add only 174 more. These deaths were certainly shocking, horrifying, and perhaps even preventable—but no more so than the literally millions of deaths over the same time period that can be attributed to heart disease, respiratory illness, and the other causes listed above.

Now imagine for a moment that the cost of the War on Terror—roughly $450 billion at the time of this writing—could be retroactively invested in research for any one of these serious medical conditions. Even if we believe that the 9/11 attacks justify the War(s) on Terror in Afghanistan in Iraq and that these $450 billion dollar wars have led to a tangible decrease in terrorism—points that are certainly debatable—isn’t it clear that more American lives could be saved by putting this same money towards treating these illnesses?

But this money, which will never bring back those lost on 9/11, has been spent foolishly and unaccountably—foolishly in expensive surprise visits (read: photo ops) from U.S. politicians to soldiers who lack body and vehicle armor to protect them, and unaccountably, to pick the most egregious example, in the $8.8 billion dollars that has simply gone missing, as noted in the 2005 inspector general’s report. This money and the wars it supports have been mismanaged in large part because we as a nation have mourned and grieved and lingered over this day until its mere evocation can justify anything—a call to war, a loss of our civil liberties, and even torture. If we will not step back from 9/11 out of respect for those still forever personally trapped in its profound loss, then we should at least step back to gain perspective on one of the most important political events of our lifetimes.

Dr. Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor at NYU whom Kleinfield quotes, points out that “[e]very political issue of our time is refracted through this event,” and in this regard he is correct. But Zimmerman suggests that this means we should never stop commemorating the event, and here he is wrong. It is precisely because 9/11 is central to our political and cultural moment that we must take off our black mourning veils and put on our thinking caps, resolving to gain perspective on the event and move forward rationally.