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911: NEVER FORGET
WHY
I dissent.
Excerpt from my notes to
myself on
Evil is real.
Any moral system
that fails to recognize the existence of evil and the imperative for its defeat
is like a child with a compromised immune system in a plague. Evil is a recurrent pathogen, an ineradicable
feature of the human condition that every age must identify and conquer anew.
The recognition of evil is the beginning of
moral obligation. To do less than to
recognize and oppose evil with passion, resourcefulness, intelligence and
steadfast persistence, is to succumb to it, to participate in it, to allow it
to capture the very soul.
God bless
Jay B. Gaskill
From 28th and
The lead headline on the New York Times editorial page today is,
“
The piece under this (dare I say it?) sanctimoniously arrogant header (all of the rest of us
who were there on that day are now at risk of remembering those events the
wrong way?) was predictable: A blend of praise for Mayor Bloomberg’s progress
with the memorial (after nine years), a slap at Rev. Jones in
Mr. Obama’s comment, coming from an administration that had earlier privately decreed that its minions and spokes-mouths were not to use the term “Terrorism” was notable for its tardiness.
Oh, now there really are terrorist organizations?
How soon we forget that this administration early on had
decided to rename the war on terror as “Overseas
Contingency Operations”
For a dose of sanity and realism, here is the Department of Defense definition of terrorism, shorn of all the politically correct censorship.
“The calculated use
of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended
to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals
that are generally political, religious, or ideological.”
As for me...I own a set of personal memories of
I wish you had been with me. On the night of
Robyn was still asleep as I quietly slipped out of bed, went to the desk chair and tapped on a keyboard. Seconds later, I stared numbly at an odd color image. An airliner had been captured mid-collision, partly inserted in the side of a skyscraper. It was an absurdly tiny image, not more than two inches on my screen. It framed the last horrific moment when most of its passengers were still alive. Evil had paid a call on our most vital city, vividly and obscenely exposing itself.
A few minutes away, the second
of two airliners had blasted
Wednesday, we wandered into mid town. By accident, we found a sacred spot. Across from St. Francis Church, a fire wagon, Ladder Truck 24, was parked by its station. The truck, covered in white powder, still piled high on the rear bumper, had become an impromptu shrine for N.Y.F.D.’s Chaplain Father Mychael Judge and his fallen comrades.
I walked around and around that
truck, staring at the tracings in the dust. Loving fingers had left
benedictions on every surface, like “HONOR
For the next week, among the floating grief and shock, we encountered countless other sacred spaces, in doorways, shop windows, on a block long unrolled scroll of butcher paper in Union Square, where a solemn little girl sat, writing...
This is what I e-mailed you on September 12:
“Evil is real.
“Tuesday morning it came to this city, near the
“Good is real. The last few days here have renewed my belief in the human capacity for heroism and virtue under duress. It is an honor to be among the New Yorkers. I wouldn’t be anywhere else right now.
“Evil has too often been excused or ignored or defined away. Yet it returns like a night flare on a battlefield, illuminating the configuration of forces. That terrible light clarifies everything. In its actinic glare, all the differences among the good melt into insignificance.”
When our plane finally roared
down the runway at JFK; the images of the candles and
photos in
How many would remain trapped in their comfortable moral relativism, living out an empty ethos of political correctness? I thought of the hollow sophisticates for whom evil and good were archaic ideas. I saw them in their comfortable places, waiting out the rage and tears of the “common people” with patronizing superiority. I could see them, anchored like prehistoric flies in amber, peering out, unaware of their confinement. How did they not feel trapped? How could anyone have experienced this without being changed?
On
So this is why I find today’s New York Times header so profoundly insulting. The “right” way to remember a major Evil Event is to remember the truth...and its implications.
The Jihad was a declaration of war against the modern world
by a virulent ideology embedded in a major world religion. The
The recognition of evil is the beginning of moral obligation. To do less than to recognize and oppose evil with passion, resourcefulness, intelligence and steadfast persistence, is to succumb to it, to participate in it, to allow it to capture the very soul.
God bless
JBG
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