9/11 REVISITED
Fear is Tyranny's Tool

With Spain's recent election results and some of the extreme liberal reactions floating around, I decide to post a piece I was holding on to until the right moment. Well, I guess this is the right time. Terrorists or tyranny should never dictate our lives and the decisions critical to our nation, its future, and the world's stability. Once you give into fear or fears of violence and death, you have already lost your freedom and the ability to act responsibly.

I'm reminded of Saving Private Ryan when the translator was frozen in fear when his fellow grunt was asking for his help. It seemed like a long minute and struggle as the solider sat on the stairs simply listening to the death of his platoon member. The German solider got up and walked down the stairs past him since he remember that it was the translator that basically saved his life by letting him go free a few days before... I haven't seen the movie in a while so I might not remember some details.

I remember feeling disgust and a small ounce of sympathy for the young, solider struck with fear. I'm not scared of many things in life and it would be second-nature for me to help my friend or associate in such desparate need, so that scene in the movie made my stomach turn with disgust against that solider. In a remote part of my heart, I also felt sympathy and acknowledged that he wasn't an experienced combat trooper. He was a pencil-pusher thrusted into the heart of battle.

Near the end of the movie he was almost vindicated when he killed the same German solider, but it was more revenge and cleansing of his past shame than vindication for a life lost. The same thing will happen if the war on terror is scaled back by the socialists in Spain, our government if John Kerry wins, and if other nations give into the fear created by al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The terrorists acts will continue, if not increase, and these government will realize after a few years that being preemptive and on the offensive was the right approach.

So below is a piece entitled, "Ground Zero: A Journal," by Vince Druding, who did the same leadership training program I did but about five years after me. It's a good reminder to what we are fighting for and why we should never lose our resolve. Also below is a excerpt from John Derbyshire's, a columnist for the National Review, December 6, 2001 entry:

"...There has been, it seems to me, surprisingly little really first-class reporting from New York's "Ground Zero." Where are the products of all those schools of journalism that now infest the academic scene? Perhaps the magnitude of that horror is too much to be encompassed by journalists trained to sniff out the latest bogus health scare, political sex scandal, inconsequential pseudo-news of the age that ended on September 11th.

Where really good reporting has come out, it has often been from unexpected and seriously un-famous quarters. There is an example in the current (December 2001) issue of Father Richard John Neuhaus's monthly First Things: a piece simply titled "Ground Zero: A Journal," by a writer completely unknown to me, name of Vincent Druding, bylined as "a Coro Fellow in Public Affairs in New York City," whatever that means. Whatever it means, Druding's beautiful and moving record of his Ground Zero experiences is one I feel sure I shall not be forgetting anytime soon.?


Ground Zero: A Journal

by Vincent Druding
FIRST THINGS, the Journal of Religion and Public Life
December 2001

September 11 was to be my first day of work at a new job in downtown Manhattan. Though New York was still very new to me, it was immediately obvious that something was terribly wrong. As I climbed the stairs of the subway just a few blocks from the World Trade Center, there was a palpable feeling of panic in the air as people stared, horrified, into the sky. I followed their gaze upward and I instantly understood. Smoke and fire were gushing from a gaping hole in the smooth, silvery surface of the right-hand tower.

I asked someone nearby if he knew what had happened, and he said it was a bomb. Another man walked over and declared, "No, it was a plane, a plane flew right into building. . . ." Then an enormous explosion drowned out his words. Above our heads, an orange fireball swallowed the top of the second tower, as clouds of paper filled the sky above us. Hundreds of people began scattering. I ran across the street to the Municipal Building and up to a shrieking woman who stammered through her sobs that she had seen a large blue and white plane slam into the building. We stared slack-jawed as sections of the building's metallic facade fell in chunks to the ground. It took a few moments until we realized that some of those falling pieces were not metal at all, but rather human beings leaping eighty or more stories to their deaths - right before our eyes. All I could think to do was make the sign of the cross.

As I stood there in disbelief, a man next to me with a messaging pager said that the Pentagon had just been hit. I grabbed at his pager to read it for myself. Then came the confusion and rumors on the street: "The Capitol's been attacked!" "The State Department has been bombed!" "The Supreme Court is in flames!" "Camp David is burning!" "A plane is on its way to the White House!"

During all this, the fire trucks had been racing past on their way to the Towers. I must have seen twelve of them rush past our corner. In the coming hours and days, I often wondered how many of the men on those trucks died just minutes later.

Soon the NYPD asked us to evacuate the area. It was only a minute after we began to walk uptown and away from the Towers that the sound of several claps of thunder began to rip through the air just over my shoulder. I turned around and saw with my own eyes a sight of pure horror, as the left-hand tower began to collapse into a massive white cloud. Our walk quickly became a run, and then a stampede. (full article)