September 11 should be a federal holiday

Brendan urges that September 11 should be a federal holiday like Martin Luther King Day, not just an opt-in national day of service (automatic video and sound).

9/11 was the catalyzing reason why we moved back East. We'd lived on the West Coast for about 10 years, and our daughter was born there. It was annoying but not fiscally impossible to fly back and forth to Bos-Wash a couple of times per year. But 9/11 made us -- or, at least, it made me -- seriously reconsider the wisdom of living 3,000 miles away from most of the rest of the family. So by July, 2002, we'd sold our car, left the Puget Sound, and crammed our household into a little rehabbed trinity just south of Center City.

I didn't lose anyone in the World Trade Center or the other airplanes. Nobody in my family is in the U.S. armed forces (I have no American cousins), though my daughter's paternal grandfather served in the Navy and is buried at Arlington. But still, I'd put my money where my mouth is and do some kind of public service every September 11 if it were a federal holiday. Martin Luther King, Jr., was only 1 person; surely we can carve out another day on the calendar to honor the 3,000 dead on 9/11.