9-11

Everyone that was mature enough to have memories of 9-11-2001 can remember where they were and how they heard. I personally was at work and about to go into a meeting that included a person from Haifa Israel. His sister worked in one of the towers, which added a more personal level. Fortunately she got out. It was a perfect blue sky clear day here in MN as well, and a day that our department had a golf outing that we decided to not cancel. No matter what anyone did that day, it was a strange day that we realized that the world would never be the same again. Much more than the JFK assassination (which I also remember) or the Challenger, which are the other two shocking negative days that I would put in the somewhat the same category, but 9-11 was unique.

What made it unique to me is that evil moved up to a new level. Plenty of people have been shot before and will be again, Presidents had even been shot. Assassination had been around for a long time and will be around forever. The Challenger was memorable, but it was an accident at the limits of technology, surprising, but not really shocking after a moment of thought. The unparalleled impact of 9-11 was that a group of people in a non-war situation would seek to kill as many people as they possibly could with no specific demands, even though the fact they could fly a sophisticated aircraft proved that they had opportunity for a better life. All Americans were targets, and we realized would always be targets, and for a least a week or two we came together and understood that.

That tiny bit of unity didn’t last long, and provides my second personal mind-change from 9-11, but let me go back to the first for a moment. Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City at least had a “target” … “the FBI”. He was a monster that killed plenty of innocents including children, but at least one would guess that once he was done killing all the FBI folks, he would be done. Nations having wars of course kill huge numbers of civilians, but without going into the morality of war, one can argue that it is a very costly competition at a nation level. Nazi Germany of the USSR winning at war could have certainly been horrendous for Americans, but the parameters of war, however distasteful had been around for a very long time, and will be around for a very long time to come.

9-11 ushered in a different view. Here were groups of people from around the globe banding together for the explicit purpose of killing as many Americans as they could, but with no explicit purpose for the killing. Maybe revenge, maybe because they felt powerless, maybe as some surrogate target for Israel, maybe because they simply wanted the power that they called “the great satan” to feel pain. The act was the message. “We are here and you will notice us” maybe comes as close as any meaning. For the first time we knew that there were people that would use ANY means they could get access to for the purposes of mass killing. Nuclear, Biological, Chemical … the limits were gone. They signed no agreements and made no statements of restraint. All Americans became targets of killers that explicitly decreed that no law or morals would stand in their way when it came to killing us.

For a week or so, we shared the threat as “Americans”, but my second great lesson came as the liberals began to leave that fold one way or another. Some of the earliest discussions were “Why did we deserve 9-11?”. Some others came up as Bush and others called the terrorists “cowards”, or “evil”. Many on the left considered it very “brave” to commit suicide in the interest of killing thousands, unsurprising since they sometimes find it “brave” to commit suicide when it is only ones own life being taken. Once life is not a gift from a higher power that comes with responsibility, both the taking of ones own life and the lives of innocents can be just as admirable with a plane and a building as it is with euthanasia and abortion.

Which brings us to “evil”; that too being a concept that made the liberals very uncomfortable, since even in the face of 9-11 such a claim was too judgmental to be applied to those intrepid warriors with box cutters. This quickly gave way to “Why do they hate us”, “We deserved it” followed shortly by “There is too much flag-waving and we are being asked to give up too much (searches at airports) and too little (economic sacrifice)”. Once Bush decided to actually take action in Afghanistan, the farthest of the left completely peeled off, and with a bit more than a month of action over there Daniel Schorr of MPR labeled it a “quagmire”, just before the Afghan cities started to fall to allied hands like dominos. Poor Daniel, he was so hoping for a quagmire.

The months right after 9-11 changed my mind about liberals. I used to believe that they were well-meaning people with a different view of America. I came to realize that America was optional to them. Since they live with an abstract view of what America (or some country) OUGHT to be, the continuation of this America was very optional, and in many ways deserved to be attacked of even destroyed. This America, or even Democracy held no special place in their minds, and other concerns, even hatred for a single President could consume their minds and especially their emotions to such a degree that all else was easily forgotten.

Those were the lessons that I learned for 9-11. For middle of the road to conservative Americans I think we re-learned that freedom isn’t free and must be constantly defended, plus, the task of defense has to include both offense and defense. Fighting terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq is way cheaper in lives and capital than fighting them in New York, Washington, and every other large American city. Liberals didn’t learn any lessons, they never do. Since the abstract perfect world that they have in their minds always remains abstract and perfect, and this world always remains far inferior, there is very little reason for them to learn.