I was reading through the list of 9/11 activities in The News & Observer this week and became increasingly depressed as I got toward the bottom. Peace, love, understanding, why-do-they-hate-us?, it-was-our-fault type activities abounded. I was looking for some “Forget, hell!” activities, but found none.
What is it with us? Can’t we get mad anymore? I’m still mad. I get angry when I see a movie made in New York prior to 9/11 and see those two towers on the skyline. I refuse to watch any of the weepy retrospectives of 9/11, where all the falling bodies and burned firemen and police are glossed over, and barely a mention is made of the nationality and religion of the perpetrators for fear of offending anyone.
I’ve searched old newspaper archives in vain to find the Shinto priests who provided invocations at the Pearl Harbor attack anniversary events, but you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a “moderate” Muslim imam at a 9/11 commemoration.
As Mark Steyn so accurately put it today (and as most of the local commemorations confirm) we’ve gone from “Let’s roll” to “Let’s roll over.”:
And so we commemorate an act of war as a “tragic event,” and we retreat to equivocation, cultural self-loathing, and utterly fraudulent misrepresentation about the events of the day. In the weeks after 9/11, Americans were enjoined to ask “Why do they hate us?” A better question is: “Why do they despise us?” And the quickest way to figure out the answer is to visit the Peace Quilt and the Wish Tree, the Crescent of Embrace and the Hole of Bureaucratic Inertia.
Count me out of the peacenik and self-flagellation observances. I’m still angry about 9/11 and am in no mood for kumbaya.
