Remember 9/11?
Do you remember where you were when you heard about the terrorist attacks?
I was dropping my younger kids off at daycare, chatting to my sitter who is also my friend. Another woman came in to drop off her children and heard us laughing and talking about something trivial. The look on her face contained both shock and horror.
"Y'all really don't know, do you?" she said. And then she told us.
For reasons I now forget, I went to my in-laws and that's where I saw Tower Two topple. My mother-in-law and I watched in stunned silence for at least another hour.
I picked up my kids, then my older daughter (who was in school). I didn't pick her up early, mainly because I thought it was better to keep things as normal as possible. She said about half her classmates were picked up early from school that day, but nobody told them what was going on.
At home, I talked to my Internet friends, many for the first time on the telephone. We watched the news for hours, mumbling, speculating, and trying to make sense of it all. We wrote e-mails back and forth to each other. We gathered with loved ones (my husband came home from work early and we just sat there, the five of us, watching the wreckage that was the life we'd known). We talked to people we hadn't talked to in years. We tried to connect with every human being we knew, just to make sure they were safe.
The closest I came to a connection with 9/11 was that a friend of mine and his wife were trapped in New York after an ill-planned business trip left them stranded for several days without a way to get home. They knew people who died in the tragedy, which made their anxiety worse.
And everywhere--everywhere--for a year or more after that, there were the flags. Everywhere, there were flags. We flew Old Glory at the Ballpark, at football games, and even in Hollywood. For a fraction of time, we were America United.
But, as Norman Podhoretz notes, it didn't last long.
It started with the fringies, and spread to the Democrat Party. We have the same old assholes making stupid arguments about the war in Iraq in an attempt to score brownie points with the knuckle-draggers...but don't question their patriotism! Or their sanity, for that matter.
We now have the Al Gore would have prevented 9/11 argument (no, really!). We have the revisionists who decry blaming the victim unless the victim is America. Then it's all our fault. Why? Because we didn't spend more time talking. As we all know, more talking is what the terrorists want. Islam is just misunderstood. The guys flying airplanes into buildings are only a small subset of Islam. Don't blame them!
Podhoretz compares present day cybernuts to 1960s era protesters and, though the means have changed, the end is still the same.
By 1975, when the North Vietnamese communists conquered the South, not a single American soldier was left in the country. But never in American history had our honor been so besmirched as it was by the manner of our withdrawal. Having left with the promise that we would continue to help save the South Vietnamese from communism by supplying them with arms, Congress nevertheless refused to send them so much as a bullet when the communists of the North were already storming the gates. As President Bush recently reminded us, to the sputtering rage of those who did not wish to be reminded, the price "was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps,' and 'killing fields.' "
It's odd watching the American Left twist 9/11 and the War in Iraq into just another political slogan. Fifteen years ago, liberals were clutching their pearls over Saddam Hussein's human rights violations. But now, they seemingly feel nostalgic for the rape rooms and woodchippers. They actually see no difference in people who die in a war and people who die in a terrorist attack (after all, both people are dead, so it doesn't matter the cause, right?).
My father, a veteran of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, was angered and disgusted by the selfish and childish protest movement of the 1960s. I completely understand his feelings after watching the Left in modern times.
UPDATE: Ahh, the predictable responses from the Pandagonistas. It's so sad their mamas wouldn't take 'em to Sylvan to improve their reading comprehension.
UPDATE x2: I agree with Lisa DePasquale:
The September 11 anniversary shouldn’t be about politics. What makes the Freedom Concert and the 9/11: Never Forget Project extraordinary is that those who participate do so to show their patriotism and remember the fallen. They aren’t doing so to make a political statement. Coming from DC, a city saturated in politics, their sincerity is encouraging. It would do many professors and administrators some good to leave their isolated worlds and join their fellow Americans in remembering a day that is bigger than our differences.
Yep. It's more than "we all had flags," Cris. Too bad your ilk misses that point.
UPDATE x3: Captain Ed discusses his memory of that day and points out,
Three years later, the terrorists still have not claimed another day. There may come a day that belongs to them, but every morning since 9/11 we have been able to say, Today is not that day. Thanks to the men and women in our armed forces, intelligence, and law-enforcement agencies, we have continued to say that.
Don't tell the Pandagonistas that.
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