Stardate 20020222.1913

(On Screen): A woman named Tristin Laughter writes about her reaction to finding out that one of her dearest friends was on one of the jets which crashed on September 11. Until that, she had been a member of the activist left, anti-WTO, you all know the routine. Then her friend died. After discussing her long friendship with Karleton Fyfe, and how she reacted when she found out he had died, she writes:

To analyze the causation of the terrorists' actions is to accept their violence as a legitimate political expression. I do not. I feel the Left grasping at the idea of anti-Americanism which is its only core now that Marxism has been discredited by history. But this Anti-Americanism is not an appropriate reaction to the murder of 5000 Americans on Sept. 11. It is clear to me that the cornerstone of the American Intellectual's entire identity is dependent on his position of "critic of the state." In a situation of moral absolutism, of mass murder, as my friend Frank says, terrorism, not "terrorism", it is heartbreaking and deeply disillusioning to see Leftist political leaders attempt to justify and explain that which the human heart is not meant to be able to comprehend. Searching U.S foreign policy for the reason that 19 men hijacked jumbo jets and crashed them into public buildings is madness. Moral relativism in the face of mass murder is sickening. And I guess, even more to the point, bin Laden's Leftist apologists, like the Nation, and all the Leftists I have already namechecked, Moore, Chomsky et al , who would like to lay blame for his actions ultimately on US support of Israel & sanctions against Iraq, have the wrong analysis.

My friend's murder has snapped me out of my dogmatic view that the U.S is evil, and all our political opponents must be good, must be right, must stand for justice and the deserving third world people, and tolerance and diversity. It has brought my years of thought into a crystallized place. The people who killed Karleton are not my people. I can't and won't listen to their concerns and beliefs. I won't condemn the U.S as responsible for their actions. I won't pretend that if the U.S. fights the supporters of this terrorist act, it's only for control of resources, or an articulation of American racism. Now I know, in a visceral, human way, that the United States has enemies in the global arena, enemies capable of a brutality and a barbarism which marks their depravity.

To be reflexively anti-something is a way of taking a position without thought. One can determine what to do, how to act, what to say just by thinking "What would my opponent most dislike?" It doesn't require you to actually examine your feelings or positions, to evaluate why you do what you do, or to make real and difficult decisions. It is intellectual laziness.

I am an atheist. I spent at least fifteen years considering the moral teachings that I was given as a Christian in my youth, and I rejected some of them, but retained others as valuable and worthwhile, and modified still others. But to do that, it was necessary for me to understand my own beliefs on a deep and fundamental level, so that I could evaluate each Christian teaching on its merits, instead of simply rejecting it because it came from the church. Had I done that I would have lost much that was valuable.

But that's a lot of work. It's more work than many people are willing to do. Tristin talks about being part of the anti-globalism movement, and finding herself questioning whether it was really right. Perhaps it was the case that big corporations would go into third world nations and employ the people there for much lower wages than they would pay in the US, but to the local people those jobs were nonetheless better than anything else available to them. Are you actually doing them a favor by saying "We're going to protect you from a low paying job by making sure you can't get any job at all"? Tristin concluded that it wasn't, and began to drift away from her ideological roots long before the attack in September. But too many young people become radical because their friends are; they protest because it's what everyone else is doing, or because it's what their professors tell them they should be doing.

Sometimes you have to have the moral courage to recognize that a situation is straightforward, and to make your own decision about it. You have to take a stand. It's not always wrong to support your own kind. There is no inherent virtue in protest, no inherent vice in solidarity.

There is no excuse, no explanation, no justification, no analysis which can reduce the magnitude of the crime committed against our nation in September. And we owe it to Karleton Fyfe's youngest child, who had not even been born when he died, to make sure that the child doesn't have to grow up in fear of such attacks. We owe it to Daniel Pearl's unborn child, too, and to the other children of the US whose parents died, or were wounded, or who lost loved ones, or who might die in the next attack if we don't act to prevent it.

I am not a citizen of the world. I am a citizen of the United States. You will not be permitted to attack my children, or to take their parents away from them.