(Originally posted on Facebook Sept.9, 2011)

Sept.11 is the start of the football season for most NFL teams this year. Sept.11 is my brother-in-law’s dad’s birthday. Sept.11 is Patriot Day in the U.S. and Teachers Day in Argentina (thank you, Wikipedia).

Sept.11 has different meanings to different people, and for many, it’s a day to remember terrible things that happened so many years ago on this day.

When something shitty happens in our lives, we don’t have much choice of how it makes us feel initially.  We’re human after all.  But we do have a choice of how to deal with it. We have the ability to seek out and choose between right and wrong, including the right and wrong way to deal with situations (reference Dave Chappelle’s When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong).

Anger, grief, revenge, sadness, hatred– all these things are natural emotions.  Modern thinking might say that it’s good and right and necessary sometimes to be angry, to not let go of these emotions but to allow them to manifest themselves “naturally.”  And while it’s true that it’s probably not healthy to bottle up anger inside, there would be nothing to bottle up if we did a better job of letting things go.  Easier said than done, but it’s true. We need to let things go.

Too often we let our emotions get the better of us.  We don’t control our emotions.  Our emotions control us, more than we’d like to admit.  We remember bad events, bad people, bad anything, to fuel this angry fire inside of us.  And for what?   What actual good does anger create?  By its nature, anger is destructive.  Only good can create good, yet we fail to seek good.

We “want” peace, but we don’t seek calm.  We “want” healing, but we don’t seek forgiveness.  We “feel” helpless, but we don’t seek help.  We look instead to revisit emotions, revisit our times of hurt, our times of anger, our times of helplessness, thinking that it will somehow give us peace.  We’re a little bit too comfortable living with our anger that we too often resort to it when we feel helpless.

Imagine that.  When things go bad, we look for anger instead of peace. We look for the devil’s fire instead of God’s help.  That’s a little disheartening.

Where the world says it’s OK to be angry, I say that’s it’s absolutely not OK and wrong to allow ourselves to be angry long after the initial pain has subsided and the dust has settled.  If you’ve read some of my older posts, I write a lot about the devil, how he’s the father of all lies, how he tricks us and dupes us to believe his lies.  One of the lies that I believe he propagates is that anger is good.  Anger is necessary.  Anger is empowering.

Anger is not empowering.  It’s a false empowerment when we feel powerless. Anger hinders our capacity for understanding. Anger is crippling. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering (thank you, Yoda).

Hate is what brought down those planes 10 years ago.  Hate is what destroyed lives and families and skyscrapers 10 years ago. And hate keeps wounds from healing, hearts from mending, and lives from flourishing 10 years later.

Love is creative. Forgiveness is healing. Peace is… well, peaceful.  Are we really seeking this as our end goal?  If not, we need to be.

Now you might think, yeah, easier said than done, all this talk about forgiving and healing and peace.  Sept.11 screwed up my life BIG time, so forgiveness is not easy for me to think about every Sept.11.  I joined the military after Sept.11 partly out of patriotic fervor, partly to pay for graduate school, and partly because my career was in a lull and in need of a change.  I let my emotions get the better of me then, and looking back on it, I probably never should have joined (though I’m thankful for the experience– gotta be, yo!).

I’m lucky.  I never deployed to the Middle East, but I had very good friends who did.  I also have a very good friend who didn’t come back, so it’s absolutely not “easier said than done” for me.  But after I got over my initial feeling of grief and sadness, I was faced with two choices: pray for peace and forgiveness for the people who blew up that bomb that killed him (a CRAZY, unworldy kind of forgiveness that God asks of all of us), or harbor resentment and anger at everyone and everything that had anything to do with this terrible war.  I choose peace.  You can’t choose both.

If I chose resentment and anger, I’m quite sure there would have been a hole in my wall, a cast on my hand, a medical bill on my credit card, and even more anger in my heart. Anger would’ve cost me money, son! And I ain’t rich! 

The anniversary of Sept.11 every year for me is an opportunity.  It’s an opportunity to reassess myself. How good of a job have I done at forgiving, at being peaceful, at eliminating hatred? How well have I filled my life and the lives of those around me with love and charity?  In short, how well have I been part of the solution and not the problem?

When we fill our lives with so much good, even in the face of death and destruction, there’s no room for evil, no place for the devil to plant his lies. And he HATES that shit.

We can make Sept.11 a day to hate Osama, Al-Qaeda, terrorists, Muslims, a day to hate war, our government, George Bush, guns, whatever you want, and it’s perfectly within your right.  But you’d be wrong.  Don’t waste this opportunity on hate.  Hate is what got this all started.