I feel that I ought to post something about the 9-11 anniversary. But I really don’t want to.
The day makes me sad. And not just (though certainly in part) for the loss of innocent lives on that black day 16 years ago.
I’m sad because, for a short time, we thought we were all united as a nation again. “This,” some of us hoped, “will be the event that will turn America back to its founding faith (secular and sacred).”
But that did not happen. It didn’t happen because of one – essentially racist – conviction held by the Left today. That conviction is that only white people possess moral agency (the ability to choose and decide issues of right and wrong). For leftists, brown people and black people cannot act as moral agents. They are like children, or animals. Their sins are always really the fault of white people.
Because of that belief, we have failed to meet the challenge of 9-11. Our enemies hoped to frighten us into compliance. And, as far as I can see, they have succeeded.
I would be delighted to be proved wrong.
9/11 didn’t cause us to unite as a country because there was no follow through. Not on our end, we conquered a country for each office building, but on the other side.
Nations get united when faced with external threats (see https://www.amazon.com/War-Peace-Rise-Fall-Empires-ebook/dp/B000S1LEJ2/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1505273090&sr=1-1&keywords=War+and+Peace+and+War%3A+The+Rise+and+Fall+of+Empires). On 9/11 we thought we had such an external threat. But it turned out to have been a lucky fluke, with very few subsequent successes against us.
In one sense, 9/11 has illustrated to me why it’s so difficult to come to consensus about anything these days. For one thing, we can’t even agree on the cause of the attacks: do “they” hate us for our freedoms? or were the attacks a response to the fact that we have so many troops “over there” in what are considered to be sacred countries? We can’t even agree on the effects: did we unite for a time to fight a common foe? or was the attack a convenient cover-up for the fact that “it was planned and managed by the government as a false-flag operation to mobilize us into war”?
Based on the reactions to this event in our recent history, witnessed and felt by so many, so directly, or so closely watched by others via mass communication tools at the time that it occurred, afterward so widely shared through all of our media, and ever since so much discussed … it’s clear to me that if God Itself appeared on Earth – with or without a Certificate of Authenticity (and who’s going to sign THAT, I wonder? and what’s that entity’s provenance?) we would argue about that for thousands of years to come, divide into sects and anti-sects, and some would use the divisions as a pretext to war.
Give us another Burning Bush (to cite one of the metaphors from the religion I’m most familiar with) and we’ll argue about permits, about species and habitat destruction, about the fakery of the image or the forging of the message revealed … or the fact that the One True God would not use that method to reveal Itself. And so forth for every religion that ever was or will be.
Maybe we’d be better off without the pretext. Let’s just start a war for the hell of it, and see where that gets us. Or, maybe NOT start a war, and see what happens then.