Posted on 09/01/2002 12:22:42 PM PDT by GeneD
We will forget. Researchers have long known that the memory of epochal events fades with time. Experts have a name for this phenomenon: flashbulb memory. As time passes, the chronology gets jumbled; we fumble on the details; we reimagine the past to make it more coherent, meaningful, bearable. A new study at the University of Illinois at Chicago of a large, countrywide sample of people is discovering that we have already forgotten some things about Sept. 11. Which tower fell first? Was the Pentagon hit after both World Trade Center towers? We forget. We conflate. We confuse.
But we know, of course, that this kind of memory is not the most important one. Some events solder themselves within our consciousness so intensely that they change forever the way we see the world. The details barely matter. The change itself matters. Your child is killed in a car accident; your mother is diagnosed with breast cancer; your wife is raped. These kinds of events stop your life for a moment; your soul freezes while the rest of the world swivels around you to a new position. Part of you insists, This hasn't happened. Part of you demands, Move on. Most of you knows that neither is an option.
And most of us know that there is no moving on from Sept. 11. It wasn't a random tragedy for which grief is a slow-acting salve. It was a massacre—a premeditated murder of civilians by men possessed by a theocratic ideology. It was an invasion—the violation of sovereign American soil, the erasure of a visible monument to American success and energy and civilization. It was a crime—the filling of the air of a great and free city with the irradiated dust of innocent human lives. It was a statement—that radical Islam intends to attack and destroy the very principles of the Enlightenment that underpin the American experiment—freedom of religion, of conscience, toleration and secularism. The appropriate response to this attack is therefore not grief or remembrance or sadness or reflection, although each of these has its place. The appropriate response is rage.
For whatever else Sept. 11 was, it was a declaration of war. The totalitarian force of radical fundamentalist Islam, like the forces of Nazism and communism that preceded it, has not disappeared. We briefly defanged it in its most important lair in Afghanistan, but even there it has not been extinguished. Saudi Arabia, the chief exporter of this murderous ideology, remains protected by the West. Saddam Hussein is currently laboring to manufacture weapons of mass destruction that his allies in the Islamist terrorist network would dearly love to use on American soil. Suicide bombers have not relented in attempting to destroy the democratic state of Israel. Anti-Semitism, now as in the past the kernel of the totalitarian mind, has metastasized like a cancer throughout the Middle East and back into its ancient home in Europe. Educated men and women who regularly find the slightest fault in democratic Western societies vie with one another to provide glib, desperate rationalizations for the murderers of 9/11: arrogant American global power somehow deserved payback, and those who deliberately kill civilians are allegedly legitimate combatants with worthy grievances.
But through all this, we know what that day showed us. It showed us that we stand deeply vulnerable to a destructive force in some ways more dangerous than even the last two totalitarian powers Americans were called on to defeat. This enemy refuses to fight with honor; it hides and disappears and re-emerges whenever its purposes are served; it may soon have access to weapons that Hitler and Stalin only dreamed of. But it cannot be defeated the way Nazi Germany and Communist Russia were defeated because it is more like a virus than a host, infecting and capturing nation-states, like Afghanistan, and then moving on to others. So we will have to act to pre-empt it this time, in Iraq and elsewhere, or it will be too late to resist it at all. For Sept. 11 showed that, for the first time in history, the American homeland is actually vulnerable to a deadly foreign enemy. Only those in deep denial can forget that.
That's why I think that for all the return to superficial normality, Americans really have changed. The illusion of isolationism has been ripped apart. How can America opt out of the world when the world refuses to leave America alone? The illusion of appeasement has been destroyed. Do we really think that by coddling regimes like Iraq or Syria or Iran or Saudi Arabia, we will help defuse the evil that lurks in their societies? The illusion of American exceptionalism has been shattered. The whole dream of this continent—that it was a place where you could safely leave the old world and its resentments behind—was ended that day. A whole generation will grow up with this as its most formative experience—a whole younger generation that knows that there actually is a right and a wrong, and that neutrality is no longer an option. That generational power has only just begun to transform the culture. In decades' time, we will look back and see what a difference it made.
Do you and you fellow Muslims hate us because we have befriended Israel, the ONLY civilized democratic nation in the entire middle-east? And if you and your fellow Muslims hate us, then why in the world are you even here? Are you here to take our money? Are you here to undermine our peace and stability? Are you here to destroy us?If so, I want you to leave. I want you to go back to your desert sandpit where women are treated like rats and dogs. I want you to take your religion, your friends, and your family back to your Islamic extremists, and STAY THERE! We will NEVER give in to your influence, your retarded mentality, your twisted, violent, intolerant religion.
Here, here.
We can only hope. I'm surprised Time printed anything like this. I would take them for the same artsy-fartsy-tolerance-and-diversity crowd that's more commonly found at the New York Times or CNN.
Thank you so much for the post and ping. Good one. We will not forget....and no, we are not the same. The press has only begun to learn this about Americans who know the difference between right and wrong, and truth and Barbra Streisand. We're fighting for God, family and country...and they can get on board or fight us.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.