A dozen years have passed since a handful of terrorists awoke America to the true nature of both the world of radical Islam and the ugly underbelly of America’s political and ideological Left.
On one hand, the continental US has been free of terror attacks of the magnitude of those visited upon us in September of 2001. On the other, it is hard to imagine why it hasn’t happened again. Consider the Boston Bombers and the rampage of Major Nidal Hassan.
We have a massive, intrusive, expensive government ostensibly dedicated to keeping the next massive attack from happening. Yet, Major Nidal Hassan - who practically begged to be identified at least as having switched sides - was able to murder 13 soldiers. The FBI investigated him to no avail.
Authorities were apparently warned by the Russian Federal Security Service about one of the Boston Marathon bombers, but much like the warnings about the 9/11 hijackers who sought flight training, they went unheeded. Millions of citizens are frisked, fondled and inconvenienced by Federal employees every day, but the likes of Nidal Hassan and Tamerlan Tsarnaev are all but handed to those responsible for our safety...and ignored. Hassan and Tsarnaev were ignored in large part for the same reasons the original 9/11 plot was ignored.
Americais lost in a morass that has sapped its spirit and confidence. Our cultural elite within just a few days of the attacks began a relentless campaign to make the global war on terror as politically correct as possible. There is no good reason to list the incidents. You either realize it and lament the confusion of the nation, or you don’t.
The so-called Freedom Tower is still not erected. Ground was broken on the original World Trade Center in 1966, and tenants moved into both towers by 1972. While World Trade Center 7 has been open since 2006, there has been a gaping hole in the New York skyline for a dozen years as the political, cultural and social sludge chokes the life out of the effort to rebuild.
America is full of men and women who have broad shoulders and stout hearts, but they are not in ascendancy today. I see them, talk with them, shake my head in sadness with them every day. The empty hole in New York is not what America is, but the illness it represents is vexing and chronic. Our nation is run by the kind of people who will search an octogenarian from Minnesota before she boards a plane, but will allow the likes of Major Hassan to shield his evil with a whisper-thin patina of faith, and congratulate themselves on their own righteousness while stepping over the corpses Hassan left in the wake of his rampage.
We will either snap out of it, or we will not. I am betting we will. The moral torpor that bedeviled America over slavery was finally exorcised by the bloody Civil War, and then the peaceful Civil Rights movement. We survived and were greater still. The Great Depression did not destroy us - a largely self-inflicted economic disaster. We survived andwere greater still. We slept as evil encircled the globe until Pearl Harbor. We resigned ourselves to a permanent Cold War until Reagan. Our nation survives, and I am confident that our greatness will return. It always does. But the pain of our wars, our economic disasters, the strife of the avoidable catastrophe makes the heart heavy.
We will survive because of the men and women who believe in America, who hunker down in times of trouble, who keep faith in both the God that sustains us always, and the principles that make us great. We will thrive because of the men and women who fight for us, who protect us, who pray hard and work hard. Men like my brother and hero Jim still slogging it out in an increasingly thankless job as a Marine. In their breast is the seed for the resurgence of the last best hope on earth. Men did not make America, men will not break America.
God is good, and His hand is faithful upon us. May we learn the lessons we must needs learn, and quickly.
