Why the terrorists will not achieve their goals.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

As a nation, we in the U.S. often look with puzzlement at the Middle East. From our POV, we see two groups of people, in the Arabs and the Jews, who have more in common than they have differences. From an historic perspective, Islam is an evolution of Judaism, VIA Christianity. We, from our melting pot perspective, have a great deal of difficulty understand exactly why these people are at each others throats. Our polyglot culture is almost unique in the world, and more special than we realize. I don’t think that we fully grasp how much difficulty these people have understanding us. They see a nation not of one people, “Americans”, but of many different peoples. In their experience, one or two sharp blows will cause us to shatter along racial and ethnic lines. It isn’t going to happen. How do I know this? I know it because I live here and am an American to the core of my soul. Many times today it was proven by the actions of common, everyday, run of the mill Americans. I know this because:

The pilot of United Airlines Flight 93 realized what the hijackers were aiming to do and flew his plane straight into the fertile soil of southern Pennsylvania rather than allowing them to do it.

Hundreds of firemen and rescue workers eagerly ran back into the second World Trade Tower after the first one had collapsed. Their goal? To save a life, one life, any life. No thought was given to what race, creed or color the victims were. Most of these folks paid for this desire with their lives when the second tower collapsed.

The Red Cross issued a call for blood. The resulting tide of Americans responding swamped every donation facility. I myself waited 7 hours to donate. I have type O blood, and I didn’t feel like I had any choice. While there, I spent some times manning the phones to spare the exhausted Red Cross staff. Any number of people came up to me wanting to take calls as well, but there was only one phone. This one small, 5 table donation center took 200 pints of blood, and I was receiving calls from people who had previously come in and gotten numbers in the 3 and 4 hundreds wanting to know if it was their turn to give yet.

The McDonalds restaurant across the street sent bags of fries and burgers for the donors. A guy from Dominos showed up and simply asked “How many pizzas do you folks need?”

Doctors in NYC reported treating any number of firemen for wounds and broken limbs. Almost to a man they hassled the docs to hurry up so they could get back to the rescue efforts.

The list goes on. And on. And on. And THAT, my friends and fellow Americans, is why we will never be beaten. It’s not because of our political leadership, It’s not because of our wealth, it’s not because of our guns, planes, ships and nuclear bombs, although these are considerable. It’s because of each and every one of us. WE ARE AMERICA. WE are a shining beacon of hope, freedom, justice and love that the blazes across the world. We must bury our dead and mourn our losses today. We will never drop the torch passed into our hands from our forefathers. In the paraphrased words of Admiral Yammamoto from 1941 " You have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve".

God bless America in this, our darkest hour.

2

what a beautiful post.

Its nice to see something good has come of this situation.

3

Thanks for this post Weirddave, we need to remember more than just the horror in times like this, we need to remember
all those who step up to help in anyway they can.

4

Thank you, Weirddave. I needed to read something like this just now.

5

Dave, you’re weird and all, but I love you, man.

A few years ago a priest I knew started a homily by saying “The United States is the greatest country in the world.” At the time I thought he was full of shit.

Today I think he may be right.

6

Dave, I hope it’s OK if I send your post to everyone I know (because I already did, sorry! I should have asked first!).

I agree whole-heartedly! God bless America! This world would be FAR FAR poorer without her!

7

All I can say is

Amen.

Think about our beginings. America really hasn’t changed as much as we’d think in the last 200+ years, has it?

8

Amen, brother.

9

Americans. We are a huge family. Like any family, we have inner tension and disagreements and fights, but when any outsider attacks us, we band together to scream in one united voice:

FUCK YOU! We will NOT be defeated!

10

Right on, brother.

Now I’m all teary-eyed at work.

11

Well said, my friend. Well said.

12

Exactly.

I am of the opinion that eventually, Sept. 11, 2001 will go down in history as the beginning of the end of terrorism.

This has rallied not only our nation, but our allies.

Humanity finally, completely, will stand up to inhumanity. Now.

13

Thanks,Dave.

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You know, I think you are right. This may be the slap upside the head we needed. I hope some good can come out of it.

15

No need to ask. Shout it to the rooftops. I am but a poor messenger for the obvious.

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Thanks Weirddave. I had not actually cried during this whole ordeal until just now. I really needed it. I just made a post on another message board where a lot of ugly sentiment is coming up. The concensus there is that carpet bombing and nuking every islamic country is the right response. I posted that vengance on innocent as well as the guilty will make us the moral equivalent of the terrorists, wich will mean they won. Out of 25 replies one person supported me.

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Amen!

Thank you dave for this. It was needed.

18

With all due respect, Dave, and without any intention to turn this into a GD, I have to disagree. My best guess is that the terrorists did achieve their objective here.

I take as my text for this sermon a thirty year old, Vietnam war-era, Doonesbury comic strip.

B.D., the American soldier, and Phred, the VietCong guerrilla, are wandering around the South Vietnamese backcountry, when they’re almost blown up by a U.S. Air Force bomb.

Phred shakes his fist at the bomber, shouting, “You heartless air pirates! I hope you can live with it! I hope you can live with all the destruction and carnage you’ve brought to my little country!!”

Up in the bomber cockpit, the pilot and copilot are talking:

“Didja hear the Knicks took two?”
“Heey! That’s great!”

The reality is that the U.S. acts in the world, and people in diverse parts of the world feel the impact of those actions in ways that make no sense to them. Why did we give Iran a Shah when they chose a Mossadegh? Why did we stick Chile with Pinochet when they’d elected Allende? Why did we support D’Aubuisson in El Salvador - a murderous thug if there ever was one, Marcos in the Philippines, Somoza in Nicaragua? What does the average American know about the day-to-day reality of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, financed in large part by our tax dollars?

Forget the geopolitics of it all. What’s the worm’s-eye view? What’s it like to be where the brontosaurus flicks its tail?

Garry Trudeau nailed it in one: people around the world feel the consequences of our actions, while we are untouched.

I believe that one of the principal objects of terrorism is simple: to address that asymmetry. They succeeded here.

That doesn’t make what they did here right. It’s still evil; it’s still an abomination. This country will track down the network that spawned this action and pull it out by the roots, with any luck. Nobody better try to make me an apologist for those guys.

This was evil. But it was also fundamentally comprehensible.

Right now, we’ve got to pull up bin Laden’s network by the roots, and deal with it militarily. But once that’s over, perhaps we should think about what we’re doing around the world, and which of those actions we’re willing to incur such people’s wrath over - to acknowledge in advance that our actions have consequences, and decide which ones have to be done anyway, rather than pretending that we touch the world lightly.

We’re doing a better job than we used to in a lot of places - thank God, the end of the Cold War has freed us from feeling we had to support a lot of genuinely heinous thugs - but we’ve still got a ways to go. And over time, our government is being replaced by our corporations - moving their operations around the world like pieces on a chessboard - as the main actors in our name.

When a corporation moves a factory into some Indonesian community, pays them enough so that they abandon their farms to come work in the factory, then five years later, pulls out to move to somewhere even cheaper, having disrupted the ties that made their life work in some fashion before, it will look like America to them. They will not hate us because we represent freedom and opportunity, because they didn’t get any of that. They just got the flick of the brontosaurus’ tail, and that’s what America will be to them.

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On reflection, the above is MPSIMS-inappropriate. I’m going to repost it to GD as soon as I get to work (and then ask the mods to kill this copy), but right now I’ve got to get to work.

Any rebuttals, can you hold your fire for an hour until I turn the above into a GD OP? Thanks.

20

I’ve reposted my long post here in GD. Please respond there.

Dave, sorry for mucking up your thread. Mods, feel free to delete my long post above if you feel that that’s appropriate.