I don’t want to remember 9/11.

I don’t want to remember Sandy Hook, or El Paso or Dayton or Orlando, Charlotte, Cupertino, Las Vegas or the Texas bell tower.

I don’t want to remember Beirut, Flight 103, Pearl Harbor.

I don’t want to remember The Trail of Tears or kids in cages.

Or Mattawan.

Or Uganda or the hundreds of the senseless slaughters that appear with a Google search.

I don’t want to carry any more the faces and cries of the families, the empty chair at dinner table, the empty bed rooms; don’t want to imagine filling the silence of a damaged heart.

Remembering doesn’t change anything.

We remember 9/11 with the caveat: “Never Again.”

But it happens again.

Because we still hate, still covet land and power and domination.

The scale of death and destruction might vary, but it happens again.

Are the deaths at the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and Flight 93 less important than the kids and teachers at Sandy Hook?

It happens again because we don’t really want to change. We want revenge and our leaders seek ways to institutionalize it because it empowers them as they take advantage of the grief of families torn apart by their inaction.

I don’t want to have to remember 9/11.

I want it to fade in my remaining days to one more day in the wash of human events when wrong was done.

What I want to remember is that we taught ourselves how to stop it.

I don’t want to be in Boston after one more event and have my grandson, as did my son after 9/11, look up at the glass face of a skyscraper and say, “I don’t want to go up there because they fly planes into buildings.”