Facebook says I should never forget; let me tell you why I choose not to forget

Three thousand people were killed in our backyard, and everyone says it's a good thing to move on, but you know what, I don't want to move on. I want that hurt and that pain to stay with me, because if I ever forget even a small piece, then I start feeling guilty.  Hell, I am stuck in the middle of Oklahoma right now, and I feel guilty that I am unable to be home in my city to grieve in my concrete jungle.

People throw up a Facebook status, then go back to watching their college football or mall shopping or whatever the fuck it is that they are doing. They have no understanding of what happened to our city that morning, and will never understand the magnitude of the tangible assault on the senses (I say that literally: the sights, the smells, the sounds).

If you weren't there, people, then don't patronize me with some empty patriotic saying in between your Saturday errands. Come sit down with me, buy me a beer and listen to what I have to say, and learn about what it was like to be a New Yorker on that day. But don't ever think that a couple keystrokes on your smartphone will ever be enough to give back what so many people lost that day. If you don't understand, then just accept that you are not part of our fraternity, and stop pretending.  

Here is the reality, as much as it hurts, you have to accept it: if you were in a position of safety where your life was not physically threatened, then you haven't earned the right to have your voice heard over those that died or those that lost something.  If you didn't spend your entire life living and breathing in the greatest city, then you will never understand.  If you were sitting in some class in junior high or high school two thousand miles away, watching it on TV, you may take solace in the fact that you can participate in the shared national shock suffered by all across the nation, but you will never be one of us -- we who were there.  

Yes, you're right: it is a shallow, elitist and exclusive view, and I should be bigger than that.  I should be better than that.  

But you do not know what it was like to have a brigade-sized element murdered in your backyard.  I do.

You can say what you want, you can feel you want, and that's fine: my soldiers and I risk our lives so you can enjoy that right.  But I don't have to like what you have to say, and I don't have to listen or care.  Not on this day.  Be deferential today and be sensitive, because it's not your day.  It's mine.  And it's the only day of the year that I deserve to be as small or shallow or insensitive to your feelings as I want.  Tomorrow, the status quo returns, and the emotional and physical and security needs of America will once again go before mine.  

But let me have today.