Today is You-Know-What, and like every year for the past fourteen years, you’re expected to feel solemn and anxious. And you should, for exactly one minute. But I’ve got another idea: how about after that initial pause for reflection, you instead focus on feeling better than ever on September 11th?

I get why we’re supposed to feel bad on 9/11—it follows an ancient logic. Converting a tragedy into a ceremony lets us control it and mediate feelings of grief and horror and loss through public performance and private reconciliation. A moment of silence has never brought anyone back to life, but it might make you feel a little less guilty about not being dead.

For each of the past fourteen September Elevenths since September Eleventh we’ve followed roughly the same regimen: we wake up to sad newspaper covers of remembrance, think about terrorism, watch some scary YouTube footage from That Day, feel nebulous dread, tense up a little when you take the subway or see an airplane, and then go to sleep thinking about terrorism. We do this each year because we feel like we have to, as if it’s rude to the dead to live normally. But the dead don’t care, because they’re dead. You know who’s still alive? A lot of terrorists!

Imagine this: you’re a member of Al-Qaeda, the once ascendant, gold standard of global terror, the Harvard of jihad. But now your leader is dead, your influence has waned, your mission is stalled, you haven’t pulled off large attack in ages, and you’re second fiddle (at best) to the new stars of ISIS. What do you have left going for you? This: once a year, you can be sure that the entire United States will feel crummy and anxious, still damaged from the attack you executed at the beginning of the last decade.

But what if we took that from them? What if this year and every year forward we used 9/11 as a national day of feeling fine? What if we were given the day off to enjoy ourselves, spend time with family members, sleep in, have a glass of wine, and not think about the threat of terrorism tomorrow and the trauma of terrorism over a decade ago? What if we didn’t feel a little extra scared on 9/11 because we were seeing a movie or having a dinner party with some funny friends? What if we were just being completely normal and catching up on the latest Hulu original content series while sipping a craft beer? I tell you what: Osama Bin Laden, if he were still alive, would hate it! He’d fucking hate it. He would be so irked by you sipping that beer and not being afraid of what he might do to you. He’s dead, but still, we can deprive lurking jihadis of this legacy, this yearly emotional attrition. We can piss them off so hard by going to a water park on 9/11.

It’s not unprecedented—we already kick back on bloody holidays without knowing it. Cinco De Mayo commemorates a battle between Mexico and France in which hundreds perished amidst a war that killed thousands. When we ask each other, Hey Brian, any plans for the 4th? We’re talking about the Declaration of Independence, which was of course a declaration of war. Would it be so different to ask each other, So, what’re you getting up to on the 11th? I don’t think so. And in fact, I do have plans for the 11th. I’m going to fly out of New York for a weekend in Wyoming, where I’ll go for walks, eat dark meats, look at rock formations, and not worry about Al-Qaeda in Iraq or ISIS or Jabhat al-Nusra or domestic white terrorists or anyone who wants me to feel like shit just because of the calendar. You can’t comfort the noble dead, because they’re dead, but you can always spite the living.

Image by Jim Cooke, source photo via Getty. Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
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