Should 9/11 Be A National Holiday?

Image by Presidio of Monterey: DLIFLC & USAG via Flickr

Can you believe nine Septembers have now come and gone since the towers fell that fall? I’m not going to wax nostalgic this time around. I did that on last year’s anniversary and the 10th anniversary next year is sure to stir up more powerful emotions. This year, I just want to consider a simple question that has been thrown around in recent years.

Each year, more and more young adults with no hard memories of that day observe the commemorations with second-hand emotions. We recall the tragedy of the attacks with heavy speeches and somber silence. The day feels different, weightier. Most of us go on with our day with that knowledge in the backs of our minds that something terrible happened on this date.

The question I am considering now is the idea of making September 11th a national holiday. The date is already called Patriot Day, a discretionary day of remembrance. A joint resolution by the House of Representatives in October 2001 called for the special recognition. President Bush signed the resolution into law later that year. Flags are flown at half-staff. A moment of silence is observed. President Obama continued the tradition of symbolically-timed silence last year before giving a speech at the Pentagon.

Still, there are some would like to see 9/11 declared a full federal holiday in which everything is shut down by the government. States and local areas would follow suit and nobody would end up working as our nation would hit the pause button for the entire calendar square. Does that sound like something you would want? I’m not so sure.

From a practical standpoint, we already have Labor Day right around this time of year. From a historical standpoint, we don’t usually go out of our way to make full federal holidays out of national disasters. For a long time, December 7th meant one thing to all Americans: The attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan in 1941. Many people don’t even recognize that anniversary anymore, but this nation never mandated a day of official recognition, and that terrible event is as close as the U.S. has ever come to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

So what do you think? Should 9/11 be a federally recognized national holiday? Do we want to remember in that way?

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