9/11

“Another story concerned a friend of a friend, a married immigrant from Poland who jumped to his death from one of the World Trade Center towers. His young wife spoke little English and was still grieving when she hurled herself off her Brooklyn apartment building roof a few weeks later. Her husband is included among the two-thousand nine hundred and seventy-four fatalities in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania on 9/11. That distraught woman and countless others like her are not included in that tally. She deserves mention because she and her fellow ancillary victims should be remembered. Their stories accentuate the misery that resulted from our failure to prevent those unprovoked assaults on the United States. They also should serve as reminders, warnings of what could happen again.” (Excerpted from An Immodest Proposal for Ending and Winning the War on Terrorism,p. 11.)

Eight years ago tomorrow, on September 11th, 2001, America was attacked. There’s no need to recount the details of that attack by mostly Saudi Arabian Islamic terrorists.

Or, is there?

It’s very normal for people to try to forget horrific events in their lives or to shift them onto the backburners of our consciousness. That’s probably beneficial for our mental health, especially if those people witnessed the horrors first hand.

It’s also very dangerous.

Our president was probably busily organizing communities in Chicago on September 11th, 2001 and/or preparing for the next session of the Illinois State Senate. He was far removed from New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, PA and perhaps that distance from the scenes of destruction accounts for his blase’ attitude toward the very present danger that is terrorism today.

Out of duty, no doubt President Obama will say a few words tomorrow commemorating the eighth anniversary of the worst assault on America in our history, but only out of duty.

It seems our president, one, fails to perceive the ongoing and possibly imminent threat of Islamic terrorists and, two, wants Americans to honor that day although not in remembrance of what happened.

President Obama may or may not be a Muslim in his heart but he definitely discounts the terrorist threat from rabid Muslims and has abandoned the use of the word “terrorism,” as if ignoring it will make it go away. It doesn’t work that way, Mr. President.

Obama has also minimized the sacred nature of 9/11 by declaring the day should be recognized as a “day of service,” suggesting that serving our communities would be tantamount to honoring the thousands of innocents who died.

Please take a few moments to visit http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/. That website, (with which I am not affiliated in any way), features photos, videos, and other other pertinent information on 9/11/2001. None of it is cheery, all of it is important to remember.

To paraphrase George Santayana, those who forget the past may rue the day when it re-occurs. And maybe it will re-occur closer to home.

Fly the flag tomorrow!