What's more American than death?

A bit of local news - the company manufacturing the steel for the to-be-built 9/11 Memorial is going to take it on the road:

(AP)-- The September 11th memorial is taking survivors' stories and artifacts from its planned museum on a national tour beginning in South Carolina.

The 15-city tour is modeled after the 1980s campaign that raised money to renovate the Statue of Liberty.

[snip]

Joseph Daniels is president of the memorial foundation. He says he hopes the memorial will be a national symbol that people will associate with being American.

I'm not sure why this story creeps me out. "Associate with being American"? I thought the idea of "American" was associated, at least in a positive way, with small-L libertarianism, equality, justice, freedom of dissent, hope for the future, stuff like that. Why we're supposed to now associate 9/11 with "being American" I'm not entirely sure. It's right up there with my discomfort at the proclamation of that day as "Patriot Day", which implies what happened was somehow "patriotic" instead of horrific.

Look, I don't "hate America". I wish we would live up to our ideals, not that we every really have, but at least we've made the effort up until now. But for some weird reason 9/11 DID change things, at least in the sense that we seem to feel what people did that day is somehow "American". Bullpshyte. I maintain what people did that day in being "little heroes"* was HUMAN, not American. It had nothing to do with patriotism and everything to do with whatever speaks to us when other fellow Homo Sapien Sapien are hurting.

People bleed when they're cut whether they're American, Iraqi, British, Polish, French, Japanese, Indonesian, Brazilian or whatever. And other people come along and bandage that cut because they're PEOPLE. The more we keep that in mind instead of somehow believing "our" deaths and tragedies are more significant than everyone else's the better off we'll be.

*Note: I mean "little heroes" not in a patronizing sense but in a Spinradian sense, in that so many who helped others that day maybe didn't change the world, but did indeed influence one other person's life in a positive way, even if it was as small as the store owners who gave shelter and maybe a bottle of water, gratis, to people fleeing the dust cloud from the collapse. "Little" heroes, maybe, but heroes nonetheless.