Nice piece. Concerning the commercialized sentimentality that has replaced any real understanding of what happened that day, the mantra chant of ‘We will never forget’ has been largely confounded and thankfully forgotten. Present day politics and our social ethos of ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’ shows we’ve learned little from the Civil War or WW2, because the lesson is not to ‘never forget’ but to always remember it can happen again.
It’s a matter of work, not emotion. If we don’t do the work, dangerous turns in our democracy could be made, like moving from patriotism to nationalism, and the great experiment could implode.