If you're going to read just one article today, the 10th anniversary of 9/11, make it Mark Steyn's sneering put down of all "the usual touchy-feely huggy-weepy pansy-wimpy multiculti effete healing diversity mush" that remembering an act of war perpetrated on our soil has become:
What's missing from these commemorations?
Firemen?
Oh, please. There are some pieces of the puzzle we have to leave out. As Mayor Bloomberg's office has patiently explained, there's "not enough room" at the official Ground Zero commemoration to accommodate any firemen. "Which is kind of weird," wrote the Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle, "since 343 of them managed to fit into the exact same space ten years ago." On a day when all the fancypants money-no-object federal acronyms comprehensively failed - CIA, FBI, FAA, INS - the only bit of government that worked was the low-level unglamorous municipal government represented by the Fire Department of New York. When they arrived at the World Trade Center the air was thick with falling bodies - ordinary men and women trapped on high floors above where the planes had hit, who chose to spend their last seconds in one last gulp of open air rather than die in an inferno of jet fuel. Far "too soon" for any of that at New Jersey City University, but perhaps you could reenact the moment by filling out a peace tag for Yoko Ono's "Wish Tree" and then letting it flutter to the ground.
Upon arrival at the foot of the towers, two firemen were hit by falling bodies. "There is no other way to put it," one of their colleagues explained. "They exploded."
Any room for that on the Metropolitan Museum's "Peace Quilt"? Sadly not. We're all out of squares.
Strangely, it takes far more effort to be in denial about what happened 10 years ago, than face up to the reality. You have to consciously ignore the facts and history as it occurred and substitute an entirely out of kilter narrative that plays the switcheroo game and makes the victim the villian. The left is practiced in this artform, but you really have to work to stretch such a template over the gaping wound of 9/11.
What did we assume our attitude would be going forward 10 years ago? Everyone appeared united in the belief that we had to face the facts of Islamic extremism in order to both defeat the enemy and keep us safe. In the interim between then and now, only by the grace of God have we avoided another calamity (and some hard work by extraordinarily dedicated people). And talk of "defeating the enemy" has largely disappeared from the national conversation, lest us rubes out in flyover country get it in our heads that all Muslims are our enemies and "Islamophobia" rear its ugly head.
Ten years from now, the potential is there for one or more American cities to have disappeared from the map due to a nuclear explosion set off by Islamic extremists. (I doubt whether anti-abortion fanatics or right wing militias are that ambitious, much less technically capable of such a crime.) Every terrorism expert says we will be hit again - nuked or not. And the current mindset being generated by political and cultural elites is not preparing us for such an attack, nor its aftermath when, once again, anger will suffuse the American public and the call to engage the enemy will echo throughout the land.
The legacy of 9/11 has been hijacked by those who believe we had it coming. Pray they are made irrelevant someday before the next attack when their naievte is exposed for the simpering hypocrisy it truly is.
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