9-11

I hadn't intended to even mention it. Two years ago today, I was at home, having been dismissed, eyes glued to the TV screen, watching the towers fall over and over again. I didn't shout, I didn't spit, I didn't grumble about Arabs or foreigners or anybody else. But I was seething inside. Never had I seen such a thing as this, in my land, in my lifetime: an act of war. The cruelty of it, mixed with the joyous fervor that those who perpetrated it and those who support them doubtless felt, yielded a sense of horrible wrongness that I made a point not to forget. But I was that day, even as everyone, myself included, blithered and shook, confident: I knew we would respond, and vigorously.


One year ago, we took stock in our classroom, and a teacher showed slides, and played some bit of ethereal melancholia in the background. I'd thought myself inured to the whole affair. The Taliban had crumbled and we were getting ready to put the move on Saddam; the situation had improved. But I found myself looking into the eyes of students who responded to the images with tears, and then I responded similarly. My voice choked, and all the sadness I never permitted myself to feel was upon me. I got through it, but at the end of the school day was in chapel, stifling sobs, asking God if this was what it felt like.


And at that moment I wasn't referring to 9-11 but every last 9-11 that had ever streaked its red trail across the earth. I thought of every last battle, every last raid, every invasion of the brutal onto the peaceful. Every bomber run. Every Rape of Nanking. Every Klansman riding out of the night.


Today, I walk neither in fury nor sadness. I feel nothing about this particular day, excepting that I remember what this day has come to mean. There are those who wish that we would wrap up and forget about the Attack, sweep them under the rug, get over it. You'll hear them express annoyance that anyone would want to remember the event. They think it gross, obsessive, that we should want to comemmorate the dead and renew our commitment to preventing such a thing. Yes, it was terrible, but...they'll say, just as so many said Yes, it's terrible but...before even the second tower had fallen. They are entitled to their opinion, and I can sympathize with their motive, if their motive is indeed not to relive horror, not to fill ourselves with the lust for vengeance.


I sympathize, but I do not agree. While our soldiers risk their lives in Iraq and elsewhere, we ought to remember why they are doing so. Reasonable people can disagree as to the wisdom of our current efforts, but to do so without referring to the context that produced it is foolish. Bill Clinton, chastizing his party after the 2002 elections, said that the people would sooner vote for someone who is strong and wrong than weak and right. He's half correct. The left seems determined to forget or downplay 9-11, and I don't necessarily think that this is entirely due to immediate political considerations. I don't think they have language in their vocabulary to deal with the event, which is why everything is prefaced with "Oh, yes, it was an awful thing, but..." They don't want to deal with it seriously, as a violent act which must be responded to in a stern manner. They want to mitigate it, explain it away, turn the response against ourselves, imply without ever standing firm on the statement that we deserved it, make sure that every last UN member agrees to every arrest, make them quietly without waving any flags of any kind and then get back to the important things, like making Social Security more bankrupt. Just remember, while listening to Dean's and Kerry's and Lieberman's sallies at our current president's handling of the anti-terror campaign: that it is now two years since the Twin Towers fell, and the Left has presented no alternatives to the Bush strategy. Vague calls to be less arrogant, yes. Brainless denunciations of Bush, yes. But no alternatives. They have no plan, and no intention of developing one. They really do wish that the whole thing would just go away.


I hadn't intended to make this a political attack, but what was the Attack itself if not political in nature? This is the real stuff of politics, the only thing that Kings and Presidents have ever done well. All the tax debates and culture-baiting and mounds of papers we create and wave at each other as though they possessed magical powers are but frivolities to distract us while history naps. The Founders didn't write the Constitution so that we could have slapfights about imaginary trust funds, but so that our liberties wouldn't be torn apart by internal divisions or torn from us by foreign threats. One of the latter has so attempted, and on this second anniversary of that, I remember my rage and my sorrow, and quietly pray for that foreign threat's defeat and destruction.