Learning from 9/11

Like millions of other Americans, I experienced a wide range of emotions on Sunday as I watched both the replays of 9/11 and the ceremonies honoring the victims.  First, of course, I felt great sadness for those who perished on that infamous day in 2001, as well as for their families.

Watching and listening to the soon-to-be seventy Paul Simon sing “Sound of Silence,” the song that propelled him (and Simon Garfunkel) to fame at the tender age of twenty-five, was like being in a time machine.  I tell you, it gave me goose bumps.

Rule number-one of life — that things change, and sometimes instantly — came to mind.  The idea that you could kiss your wife and children goodbye in the morning and end up jumping a hundred floors to your death within an hour or two is not something that is fathomable to the human mind.

Those who, for one reason or another, arrived at work at the World Trade Center later than usual on 9/11, those who changed flights or arrived too late to board one of the four hijacked planes, and those who somehow escaped before the twin towers collapsed must surely wonder why they were spared.

Their “luck” gives reassurance to the true-believing atheist.  After all, why would a just and loving God select certain innocent people to die horrific deaths while others escaped that fate through what appeared to be pure chance?

It’s the age-old question that became the title of Rabbi Harold Kushner’s classic, Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. Even to those of us who believe that a Higher Being created the Universe, created science, created human beings (whether through evolution or via a quicker method, as the paleontological records suggest), it’s gut-check time.  We simply have no answers as to why God allows evil, as we perceive it, to exist.

Another emotion I felt was anger — anger toward the millions of vile, soulless human beings who commit violent acts against others.  Not just so-called Islamic terrorists, but those who commit the most heinous crimes imaginable against both strangers and their own families.  It makes you wonder what the point of free will is.  Why doesn’t God just equip everyone with a solid moral compass?

The truth is that no one knows.  Those of us who believe that the Universe, let alone humankind, would not be possible without the existence of a Higher Being refer to it as faith, which is an irrational mind-set to the atheist.  But as Blaise Pascal put it, “The heart has reasons which are unknown to reason.” There is no way to make sense out of 9/11 or any other tragedy where innocent lives are lost.

Then there’s the subject of patriotism.  While feeling sadness for the victims and their families, as well as respect for those in the military who sincerely believe their mission is just, I was a bit uneasy about the drum beating and subtle calls to patriotism at the 9/11 ceremonies.  I know this angers staunch conservatives, but whenever that patriotic drum beat becomes too strong, I can’t help but think of all the death and destruction it has led to throughout history.

On Sunday, I happened to see the end of an interview with a gentleman whose name I did not catch, but he was emphasizing how wrong it was that less than 2 percent of the population protects the other 98 percent.  He repeated it enough times to bring the word draft clearly to mind, something that honor scout Charlie Rangel has been lobbying for for years.

It reminded me of the time I first heard Mike Huckabee say that he felt strongly that the United States should have mandatory public service for all young adults.  Again, I realize that there are many well-meaning people who believe in public service, but anything mandatory is the antithesis of freedom.

I concede that freedom isn’t free, especially in today’s dangerous and hate-filled world, but in most cases I don’t believe the price has to be the maiming and killing of our sons and daughters.  It’s a matter of heeding the warnings of George Washington and other Founding Fathers to do everything possible to avoid foreign entanglements.

I can see good arguments for the need to stop a Japan or a Germany in World War II, but life was much simpler then.  The mission was clear, we acted swiftly, we totally destroyed our enemies, and, as a result, they very quickly became our allies.

Very ugly, to be sure, but it was over with relatively quickly.  Today, by contrast, we’re in the tenth year of fighting a war against a stone-age enemy, and no one even knows what constitutes victory.  Contrary to what many politicians and military leaders would like us to believe, we will end up leaving Afghanistan some day without a “victory,” just as the Russians did before us.

Ditto Iraq, which will either be taken over by Iran once American troops pull out or will devolve into a country ablaze with civil war.  Trying to force the American way of life on uncivilized people is not a worthwhile way to spend money and human blood.  To date, we have lost three times as many American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan as were lost on 9/11.  Does that really make sense to anyone?

Which leads to my final thought on Sunday — the dysfunctional nature of modern-day America, an America devoid of certitudes, an America that bears little resemblance to the one in which I grew up.  That was an America where personal freedom was in much greater supply … where Muslims on the other side of the world had little relevance to our daily lives … where America was either revered or feared by the rest of the world.

Today, ten years after 9/11, I don’t believe our greatest threat comes from Islamic extremists.  I believe if it were not for our moral decadence, America could deal with that problem rather swiftly.  And the first step toward that end would be to stay out of uncivilized countries and allow their uncivilized people to kill each other rather than killing Americans.

Sorry, but while I may not agree with Ron Paul 100 percent on this issue, he definitely is on the right side of it.  I have great empathy for all the people worldwide who are victims of poverty, religious brainwashing, and murderous regimes.  But policing the world is not in our Constitution.  Spreading democracy is not in our Constitution.  Nation building is not in our Constitution.

Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here.  I’m for a greater emphasis on national defense — defense of our four borders and defense of every square inch of our country.  If we invested in the technology necessary to accomplish that end, the threat of radical Islam would begin to dissipate.  The place to nation build is right here at home.

It would be much less expensive, in lives and money, to send countries throughout the world a straightforward message:  Send a nuke our way, and you can expect ten nukes in return.  That goes not only for Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea, but for Russia and China as well.  In case you missed it, I don’t recall the Soviet Union sending many of its tens of thousands of nuclear warheads our way during the Cold War.  I wonder why that was?

There is no more powerful defensive weapon than your enemies fearing you.  The hard truth is that the rest of the world used to fear us, but they now laugh at us because of our weak domestic underbelly.  That’s why I would favor much swifter and much harsher justice for perpetrators of domestic terrorism.

Having said this, the greatest danger Americans face today is a loss of freedom at the hands of politicians who believe they possess rights the Founding Fathers never intended them to have — the right to take the fruits of our labor as they see fit, the right to enforce their ideas of what is, and is not, politically correct, the right to regulate our businesses out of existence, the right to socially engineer how we think and what we can, and cannot, do.

I’m talking about statists, particularly on the left, who believe it is their right to force you to conform to their moral standards and their globalist views.  They want to crush free speech; they want to crush free markets; they want to crush individual responsibility.

These are the people who are, at a minimum, indirectly responsible for what happened on 9/11.  Why?  Because they have caused the most energy-rich nation in the world to become an energy beggar.

If oil companies were able to drill for oil in ANWR, off the coast of California, up and down the East Coast, in the Gulf of Mexico, and anywhere and everywhere within the continental United States — not to mention bringing as much oil as possible to the U.S. via a pipeline from the oil sands of Canada — the United States would not need to have an imposing presence in the Middle East.

I hope Americans don’t take away the wrong lessons from the heart-wrenching 9/11 ceremonies this past weekend.  Those 3,000 innocent souls did not need to die on 9/11, nor did the 6,000 members of our armed forces need to die in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I know it’s antithetic to the thoughts of many Americans, but if we really want to prevent another 9/11, we should be focused on the enemy that for decades has infiltrated our government, our schools, and our American way of life.  The irony is that by stealthily attacking us on a daily basis and weakening us from within, our internal enemy makes it ever easier for Islamic fanatics to attack us in ways that are much more visible to us.

Yes, my mind is always open to new ideas and facts, but this is the way I see things today.