After 9/11, Rudy Wasn't Rescue Worker--He Was a Yankee (Spent 2x More Hours at Baseball than WTC)

Thirty hours is about what I spent there starting on the 12th, most of it in the pit. Saw enough for a lifetime. Worked with guys from as far away as Alabama, Texas and California. Where were you?

Thirty hours is about what I spent there starting on the 12th, most of it in the pit. . . Where were you?

Thank you for your service. About then, I was home, 60-odd miles away, writing this, which was removed from the FrontPage archives about a year later:

AIRPORT INSECURITY—And Why Manhood Cures Terrorism

FrontPageMagazine.com | September 14, 2001

THE TERRORIST ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11 tell us that we are not in a crisis of security measures, but of manhood. It appears that the pirates who commandeered the aircraft of the most high-tech civilization in history, subjugating passengers and crew who outnumbered them 20 to 1, were armed only with knives.

There were heroic moments nevertheless. A handful of passengers on one of the four planes, United Flight 93, apparently rushed the hijackers and made them miss their target as the plane went down. No doubt other acts of heroism and self-sacrifice occurred on that and other flights, which we may not learn about in this life. But Flight 93 raises the question of whether swift action by passengers at the first sign of trouble might have entirely prevented all four hijackings. Why didn’t it?

Thwarting the crimes would have required the presence of a number of daring, independent-minded men on each plane who were willing to violate the taboos of our polite, white-collar society.

I heard John Lawless, public safety director for Logan Airport, explaining the Sisyphean program by which the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) hopes to make flying in Boston safe. It includes banning all knives, including plastic ones, from the secure areas of the airport, even at food concessions. That seems likely to make airports more vulnerable, rather than less. Everyone in the perimeter will be sufficiently disarmed that all it will take to hijack a plane is a case of bad breath.

One might reply that Logan’s security guards (who henceforth will be state policemen) will have weapons. Or that an armed Sky Marshal will be aboard each plane. But consider that guns can be swiped from holsters. In an airport or plane sterilized of all other weaponry, a terrorist with an officer’s Glock becomes the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind — facing a populace armed with plastic spoons.

I hesitate to say that the logical conclusion is to force all passengers to board planes naked and unconscious, because someone might take me seriously.

People in the public safety business seem to have 19th-century ideas in a world of 21st-century transportation. They have only one solution to any problem: trying to control it from the top down, keeping ordinary citizens as helpless as possible, lest they cause more problems.

In the interest of creating a safer and easier society, we in the West have passed laws designed to keep weapons out of the hands of disorderly persons. What the laws effectively do is keep weapons out of the hands of most persons. And that can work well—in a controlled environment. But we are in a mobile society with a flight system open to the entire world. No police force or army can protect people who have emasculated themselves of all weapons. Order cannot survive where men in particular have given up the idea that it is right and good that they be equipped to stand up for themselves and protect the innocent.

Rather than seeking the diminishing returns of intensified control over the innocent, surely it would be simpler and safer to use the leverage of freedom to intimidate the guilty:

Allow any airline passenger to carry any sidearm of his choosing—concealed or unconcealed.

Anyone who tried to commandeer a plane would find himself surrounded by hostile fire, and enjoy a short career. There might be a risk of injury or death to some innocent passengers from stray shots or cabin punctures. But isn’t that a better risk than that of losing all 300 passengers and thousands of other innocents on the ground?

But it’s more likely that there would be no in-air firefights at all. If the FAA solemnly announced that passengers were free to carry private firearms, that would end discussion of the plane-hijack option among terrorists, whose greatest fear is to die in humiliating failure.

Some terrorists would try to think of other approaches to terror, of course. But the spell would be broken. For a small band of lunatics to hold a huge crowd helpless and sear the psyche of the civilized world, the crowd must be unarmed. The whole warped project of the terrorist — using a small piece of technology to make large numbers of people sit still for ideas they would otherwise laugh at — cannot survive the democracy of force.

I doubt the FAA will change its mind tomorrow. The institutions of Western culture long ago adopted feminism—a philosophy that holds that the leadership and physical strength of ordinary men are dangerous, unnecessary, and possibly evil. But feminism is built on a contradiction. For women and children — including feminists — to survive without male leadership and protection, they must be kept in a protected world where unseen male policemen or soldiers keep the bad men far away. That world is now gone.

Even now, our culture could be in the process of reclaiming its true sense of purpose to defeat its terrorist enemies. Perhaps Jeremy Glick will be an example for other men. A passenger on Flight 93, Glick called his wife on his cell phone to tell her that he and some others were about to jump the hijackers — and he told her to have a good life and raise their three-month-old daughter well. Because of these men’s heroics, Flight 93 crashed in a field south of Pittsburgh, instead of destroying the White House.

There will be no more hijackings when American men decide that they will defend their families and their neighbors from barbarians, risking their lives if necessary. Perhaps next week, men inspired by recent events will start practicing at shooting ranges. Others may take up (or re-learn) boxing or wrestling, or the Oriental martial arts — which were invented by peasants denied the use of weapons by their overlords. But rather than the specifics, it is the change in our attitude from passivity to mastery that will change our culture and our destiny.

Right now, civilized people wonder where the next disruption to their lives will occur. When they quietly arm themselves, it will be the terrorists — the diminishing number who will be attracted to that trade — who will be moving nervously from place to place, wondering which face in the crowd, which stockbroker, which accountant, which shopkeeper, which schoolteacher, will make their dreams of domination evaporate in an instant.

There will be no more hijackings when American men decide that they will defend their families and their neighbors from barbarians, risking their lives if necessary.

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Good stuff and apropos in other ways recently. A gang of illegals has targeted my town in Nassau County for daytime burglaries and home invasions (four in the past week). For the first time in years I have unlocked the chest and put a handgun in a quick-grab spot on each floor.

Vote against all Yankees, Romney is a Yankee, Rudy is a Yankee, Klinton is a Yankee, Dodd is a Yankee, Kucinisch is a Yankee, Gravel is a Yankee, Kerry is a Yankee

Ron Paul is patriot in a troubled time. Fight the Yankees.

That wouldn’t bother me since I am a “yankee”, too, though I am not about to vote for any democrat. I am not about to vote for anyone candidate, Republican or Democrat, who advocates handing Iraq over to the Islamic Caliphate. BTW, my great great grandfather sacrificed an eye in the cause of preserving the Union.

YOUR GRANPAPPY LOST HIS EYE, WE LOST OUR FREEDOM

Your “freedom” kept millions in shackles. If you try to defend that, you will do nothing but reveal yourself to be a racist, sonething I suspect anyway.