9/11: reflections on twenty years

A hellish story in pictures. We begin on a bright September morning:

I was in DC, between classes, at the Catholic University library when I heard the news that "the twin towers had collapsed." Like much of the country, though, I still didn't understand fully what was going on, but over the course of the day, the news filled in the details. I wonder, today, whether I would trust the news to report any sort of massive disaster in a fair and objective way.

The Muslim world cheered the destruction, and America divided into camps: those who felt we had to strike back at the enemy, and those who felt we needed to pause and understand why the enemy had done this. I wasn't sure where I stood back then, but I know now, and I can say that there's a reason why you don't bring into your country a populace that already has its own jurisprudence and laws for daily life, and that generally refuses to assimilate into the greater society over the years. 

Look at France and its Muslim communities: sure, there are some Westernized, Gallicized Muslims in France who say they are as French as any other Frenchman, and maybe they are. But in the French banlieues are the unassimilated Muslim masses who, generation after generation, live in a state of incestuous amplification, walling themselves off from the greater society while nursing their resentments, violently defending their neighborhoods to the point that French police have declared certain areas "no-go zones." 

The story of immigration in the West has normally been one of integration within three generations: the fresh-off-the-boat arrivals re-create the society they've left behind; the first generation of native-born Americans (or Frenchmen, etc.) speak two languages and straddle both Old World and New World cultures; the third generation, grandchildren of the fresh-off-the-boat crowd, are more or less fully assimilated into society. This is not what is happening in Muslim enclaves in France, Germany, and other places in the West. Is it racist to see this as a problem? Sorry, PC people, but I think not. It's a huge problem that we collectively don't have the guts to face because we're all so afraid of the "racism" label. The truth is this: those with values antithetical to the values of your community have no place in your community.

Whatever the controversies, America knew it had to rebuild. But first, we would start with the language of symbols—rays of light to represent what was lost:

Eventually, the Twin Towers were replaced by the Freedom Tower.

Who was it who said that skyscrapers are now basically terrorist magnets?

In terms of symbols, the following image was one of the most poignantly iconic for me:

DC was a confused place when 9/11 happened. As we all found out later, DC's disaster plans hadn't been updated since the 1970s. A lot of us started talking about how much worse this all could have been: DC is connected to Virginia by several bridges; off the top of my head, I can think of the 14th Street Bridge,  Memorial Bridge, and Key Bridge. Those could all have been blown up, creating bottlenecks and untold chaos. There was chaos and gridlock, anyway, but things could have been so much worse.

So where are we now as a nation, twenty years on? At each other's throats, it seems. I'm actually happy to be away from the insanity here in Korea. I disagree completely with Biden's and the far left's insane agenda, and I want no part of it. 

It's also unclear that we learned any deep lessons from 9/11; when GW Bush misguidedly attacked Iraq, I was against that war because I knew what it would lead to, and I was proven right while my rightie and rightie-sympathizing friends all advocated for war at the time. Sorry to say "I told you so," but I told you so. Attacking Iraq was stupid even if Saddam Hussein was a monster, which he undoubtedly was. A tense stability in the Middle East would have been better than the mess we made when we toppled Saddam's government and replaced it with what we thought was something more democratic. 

But the arrogant neocon contention that "everybody everywhere wants [American-style] freedom" has shown itself to be hollow and empty, and with the advent of Trump, a new vision of pacifism tried to take its place. Trump started no new wars, had no democratization agenda, and lost no troops in places like Afghanistan. Our current Drooler in Chief, barely into the first year of his first term, has already lost over a dozen troops and stranded God-knows-how-many Americans in a Taliban-dominated hellhole. But the greater point is that Biden, the left, and anti-Trump elements of the GOP are still beholden to the neocon/globalist way of seeing the world, thinking they can export American-style freedom and keep bringing in those dollars. This is why Trump was hated by everyone, not just the left: he represented a new way of dealing with foreign powers and managing the US's economy. The globalists didn't like that, so Trump had to go. Hence the 2020 Steal. Do you really think Joe Biden earned his supposed 80 million votes? Then you're the loony one.

So with little to nothing learned from the bloody nose we received on 9/11, and with American prestige now effectively in the gutter thanks to the current idiot in the Oval Office, my beloved country flails and quails, unable and/or unwilling to face certain stark truths about itself, among which: "a house divided against itself cannot stand." (Matt. 12:25, Mark 3:25, then later, Abraham Lincoln) Truly, where do we go from here? I ask progressives, who supposedly believe in the ideal of progress, how much we've advanced in twenty years. Have we advanced at all? Or are you one of those leftists who think the very notion of "progress" is an artifact of white supremacy? A progressive who sees progress as bad?