Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Never Forget

It has been six years today. I wish that I had something memorable to tell you about what happened that morning, or that I remember exactly when I first heard about it, but it is all still something of a blur now. Over at James Lileks' blog, he tells about what he remembers, and many of the comments are from readers telling their memories--as important to our generation as, "Where were you when you heard about Pearl Harbor?" was to the Greatest Generation.

What I do remember is the following Sunday, walking into church and being utterly shocked at how many people where there--far in excess of the normal crowd. Great evil has a way of forcing people to consider deeper questions--to back away from mindless materialism and ask if there's something a bit deeper involved.

My own job was evaporating away; my employer was issuing promises instead of paychecks, and I briefly considered joining up--but I was 45, and too old.

A lot of people have short memories, and after a certain amount of hesitation, the left went into full force efforts to blame the United States for the terrorist attacks, and argued that invading Afghanistan was a bad thing to do. Jonah Goldberg points out the absurdity of what has happened in those intervening six years:
If I had said in late 2001, with bodies still being pulled from the wreckage, anthrax flying through the mail, pandemonium reigning at the airports, and bombs falling on Kabul, that by ‘07 leading Democrats would be ridiculing the idea of the war on terror as a bumper sticker, I’d have been thought mad. If I’d predicted that a third of Democrats would be telling pollsters that Bush knew in advance about 9/11, and that the eleventh of September would become an innocuous date for parental get-togethers to talk about potty-training strategies and phonics for preschoolers, people would have thought I was crazy.
It seems that much of the population has a very, very short memory, and a remarkable capacity for rationalization. It doesn't help any that the left controls most news media and universities.

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