"Never Forget"? Guess What, We HAVE

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Tomorrow is the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I remember that awful day like it was yesterday: I was working as a medical transcriptionist for a child evaluation center. We were huddled in the break room, watching the TV (and one of the psychologists guarded the door to make sure it stayed closed so that no child accidentally wandered in and saw it). And, like the Alamo, the USS Maine, and Pearl Harbor, we said we'd "never forget." Apparently we have. Yesterday I saw two, count 'em, two news stories about stores seemingly making light of 9/11. One was a Wal-Mart that had sale display of 12-packs of Coke formed in the shape of the World Trade Center's twin towers. The other was a commercial for a mattress store that offered any size mattress for the price of a twin mattress. There were two stacks of twin mattresses (with American flags on them) behind the announcer, and at the end she pushed two guys into the stacks, causing the mattresses to fall over. That mattress store has closed temporarily to let the furor die down, and someone's going to be fired (the corporate office has already not-too-subtly announced that). The Wal-Mart took the Coke display down (and, to be fair, it's usually the product suppliers that do those displays, not the store). But I can't even begin to articulate how disturbing this is. It's a natural progression, I suppose. We've taken the two holiest days in the Christian religion -- Christmas and Easter -- and reduced them to a buying frenzy and an inexplicable combination of bunny rabbits and eggs. We have taken the solemnity of Memorial Day -- originally designed to honor our war dead -- and turned it into "the beginning of summer" where you can "save thousands on a new car!!!!!" Our nation's independence -- which was fought for and won with a brutal war -- is celebrated with people seeing how many hot dogs they can shove into their mouths in five minutes. We set aside a day to give thanks for our blessings and that's become a day of overeating and watching football, followed by a day where we camp out in front of stores then fight one another for the best discount on things that we bought last year. How much longer until Target starts advertising the big "white sale" for Martin Luther King day? Or groceries advertise a Yom Kippur pork chop sale?