9/11: A Day For Suffering

[This is a repost from 2006. Barbara Streisand's husband actually wished a radio host a "happy 9/11 day!" in 2007.  When the host chastised him, Brolin started to complain about the people who "had been left behind."  The host cut off his anti-Bush screed and suggested he talk about the movie he was being interviewed to promote instead.  Tomorrow - for that matter, probably today - we'll have moved on from any remnants of the grief and anger so aptly described by Leonard Pitts' letter to the terrorists and return to our naval gazing. I still long for a Churchill; a leader who will unite us and exhort us to DO something.  Besides go to the mall, that is.  McCain and Palin both have sons in the fight.  Maybe they'll be those leaders.  Who knows?  But we need it.  We need someone to rally the people and make clear what we're up against.  We need someone to clearly define the fight - not a "war on terror," which is just a method of attack that can be used by anybody (like Obama's buddy Bill Ayers) but against a murderous ideaology that demands our submission and enslavement.  The fight is not just in the battlefield but also against lawfare and propaganda.  As a nation, we still don't get it, and this Dan Simmons story really drives that point home.  We've had a great deal of success in Iraq and are on the verge of winning there, but we still have Afghanistan to deal with.  This will be a long war, according to a top general, a generational war, fought on many fronts, because the ideology that our "ally" Saudi Arabia is STILL exporting has to be stamped out.

"We're in a generational war. You can try and fight the enemy where they are and where they're attacking you, or prevent them and defend your own homeland," said Gen. Schissler, deputy director for the war on terrorism within the strategic plans office of the Pentagon's Joint Staff.

"But that's not enough to stop it. We've got to break the chain, and that's ... the ideology. We really need to show the errors in Islamist extremist thinking."

Gen. Schissler said he is concerned that Washington politics is weakening the will of the nation.

"I don't care about the politics. I care about people understanding the facts of what's our enemy is thinking about, what's our strategy to defeat them, and for [Americans] to understand that it will take a long fight, mostly because our enemy is committed to the long fight,” he said. “They’re absolutely committed to the 50-, 100-year plan.”

“One of my concerns is how to maintain the American will, the public will over that duration,” he said.

This is a sad day, a solemn day, and I hope that it always remains so.]

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In 9/11 and Katrina I commented on how I responded to 9/11.

Like most people, I remember exactly where I was on 9/11. I was working a help desk for a hospital system, and the phone unaccountably stopped ringing. I could make outgoing calls, but after a while I wondered if there was some problem with the phone, so I went to go ask the folks in the control room if they knew anything about it. Half the department was huddled around the TV, watching replays of the first plane hitting the tower. Then the second plane hit. I left the room and sat by my silent phone, playing spider solitaire. After a while I went back to the control room, and watched the replays of the towers falling. Then I ate lunch, caught up on some projects I was working on, and went home, having answered maybe 5 calls all day.

A week later the magnitude of it really sunk in and I completely lost it.

I have spent many hours researching the life of Rudy Mastrocinque for my 2,996 tribute. In some ways, he was quite an amazing man, but in others, he was actually a fairly typical American. I don’t say that to diminish him or his contributions to society, but to exult in the fact that this really is a very special country. We are free. We can choose whether to go “above and beyond” and in what area we would like to serve. The fact that so many people use their freedom to serve others in any capacity, rather than sit at home and watch CSI reruns, is just amazing to me. I know quite a few people who live and love and serve others much like Rudy Mastrocinque did. Typical Americans, yet irreplaceable.

While learning his story, I cried nearly continuously. I cried for his wife, who is around my age, because she lost the man she was married to for almost 20 years. I cried for his daughter, 15 or 16 at the time of his death, because he will not be able to walk her down the aisle. I cried for his son, 11 at the time of his death, because he will have to grow to manhood without the example and input of his father. I cried for his brother, because Rudy will never see his children – twins born after his death. I cried for all the children who lost a coach who knew that soccer is a game, not a life or death match, and yet also knew that learning to play fairly and energetically helps you in so many other areas of life. I cried for his friends and his soccer teammates, who lost a buddy who was caring, clever, and just fun to be around with his steady supply of jokes. I cried for America, who lost so many good and caring people, and in many ways, our innocence, on 9/11.

And finally, I cried even more because so many of my countrymen do not seem to understand that the loss of nearly 3,000 of our countrymen is not the cost of doing business, not excused by any “root causes,” not a cause for manipulation and blameshifting on the part of ANY political party, and in short not acceptable for any reason whatsoever. Some people have openly stated that they’d like to see another successful terror attack because it would further their political goals. Others have said it doesn’t matter, because more people have been killed in other places and circumstances, and that it’s wrong to focus on these “few.” Just on this one day, I hope that those people will remember that the people who will be killed in the next big terror attack – and there’s bound to be a successful one eventually – are real people, like Rudy Mastrocinque. Not pawns on a political chessboard who may be sacrificed for expediency’s sake. Not just nameless, faceless victims who happened to die, as we all will die someday.

It’s personal. Every loss is personal, every attack and every threat is personal. The point of the 2996 project was to remind of us that. Not out of fear, because “next time it could be you” but out of respect and remembrance of the magnitude of our loss as a nation. In order to read each tribute over the next year, you would have to read 8.2 tributes a day, or 249 a month or 57.6 a week. To read them in a week, you’d have to read 428 a day. To complete them all on 9/11, you’d have to read 124.83 tributes an hour, for all 24 hours. That’s how many people we lost. They deserve to be remembered, and it speaks well of us and of them if we suffer some pain in the remembering.