Garden of Old Grudges

Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast has what she calls heretical but I call an emminently sensible view of yesterday's demonstrations.

There's something that I variously call "The Book of Old Grudges" or "The Garden of Old Grudges", depending on what metaphor I use on any given day. It's the syndrome, and I know you either have varying degrees of it or know people who do, characterized by an unwillingness to let go of bad things that happened in the past and a seeming sense of gratification one gets from reliving those bad things over and over and over again. You see it in people still bitter over divorces that happened decades ago, even if they are happily remarried. You see it in women who persist, twenty, thirty, forty years later in describing themselves as "survivors of rape". You see it in people who are unable to find a way to live with the scars of childhood trauma. They are unable to in any way get past something awful that happened to them and instead nurture the trauma, sculpting it into something lasting, something that pervades everything about their lives. They get "stuck" -- unable to live, unable to move along, unable to find a place for the terrible things that happen in life.

SNIP

The endless flogging of 9/11 for political purposes has forever sullied any kind of public observance of this day. Next year on this day we will have read the names of the dead in each year of the decade since the attacks. We should never forget what happened. But after a decade, it will be time for those of us lucky to have been personally untouched by the tragedy to put it away and get on with the business of living, instead of being stuck, like rocks at the side of a stream.

Read the whole thing.