Remember

7 years. 365 weeks. 2557 days.

Think about all of the things you've done in that time, and all the important events in your life. Engagements. Weddings. Children being born. Graduations. Promotions. Vacations. Moments with friends and family.

Now think about the fact that 3,000 people lost the opportunity to be a part of such things on a day that dawned bright and sunny 7 years ago. Think about the grief their families and friends experienced.

I remember walking home from work that day, because I didn't want to stay in my downtown D.C. office and because traffic made driving impossible. The memory of watching the towers fall is seared into my brain. So is the fact that the actions of the folks who fought back on Flight 93 might have saved the lives of thousands of people in DC, including me.

I'm grateful for what those people did. I'm grateful for the people who defend our country today and prevent such things from happening again. I'm grateful that I'm still here to celebrate the events above, and hope dearly that those who lost loved ones that day have found some measure of peace in the years since then.

I have a daughter now, and some day I expect that she'll ask me about that day. I don't know what I will say, but I do know that I won't forget it. And none of us should allow ourselves to do so.

Every so often, I re-read something I wrote less than a week later in response to an email question expressed by a friend. I'm including it here (with minor edits to remove references to people's names and a references to a couple stories that I can't find a link to), because I still think it's relevant. I apologize for the language, although it's not that harsh considering other things on this blog...

Let's start with this quote from the last e-mail: "i see this attack on us and it makes me think, jesus christ, what have we done to deserve this? what have i done?"

The answer is this: we have done NOTHING to deserve THIS. You have done NOTHING to deserve THIS.

Hey, I know it's popular to sit around and engage in self-analysis in our society. I also know it's another fun game to assign responsibility for an act to someone other than the perpetrator. Combine the two in this case and you get something along these lines:

These people attacked us because of something we did, and we need to change those actions and what we do.

Bullshit.

These guys attacked us because they are sick motherf---ers. They attacked us beause they have no respect for human life. They attacked us because their diseased worldview takes the scripture of an honorable religion and transforms it into a perverse directive for hatred and mass murder in the name of a Greater Power. We've had monsters like them before in the world. Most recently, we saw these monsters in the form of Pol Pot in Cambodia. In the form of Josef Stalin in the USSR. In the form of Adolf Hitler in Germany. We called these people, their followers and the movements what they were: EVIL.

Hey, maybe evil doesn't exist in our cultural vocabulary anymore. In our culture, we can damn near humanize anyone; try watching The Sopranos if you don't believe me (and before we start, I love the show). Tony Soprano's a bad guy who cheats on his wife, kills people and makes his living breaking the law... but he cares for his kids... but he's only trying to make a living... but he was raised in this culture... but he's relatively a good guy... but he loves his wife... but he cares about his friends when he's not killing them... but he would beat anyone who tried to order a veggie calzone (with my full support, I might add)... but... but... AND WITH ALL THOSE BUTS, YOU FORGET THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT THAT HE'S A BAD GUY. Every person has redeeming values; Hitler made the German trains run on time and created the Volkswagon. That doesn't make him human. It doesn't make him a good person.

All right, so they're evil. But we made them that way, right? Maybe our foreign policy didn't warrant the wholesale destruction of buildings and the mass murder of innocents, but what did we expect? Our foreign policy fostered their hatred, right?

All those malnourished Iraqi children wouldn't hate the United States if it weren't for our sanctions. All those Sudanese wouldn't hate us if we hadn't bombed their aspirin factory. And all those Palestinians, celebrating in Nablus, they hate us because we arm and fund their oppressor, Isreal.

Reality check: Isreal doesn't terrorize innocent Palestinians. It's the other way around. When's the last time a Jewish settler walked into a Palestinian Sbarro and blew himself up? When's the last time you saw little Isreali kids running around with guns, trying to take out anyone who's Palestinian? When's the last time you saw a crowd of Isrealis jump two Palestinian soldiers and beat them to death while broadcasting the event via cellphone to the wife of one of the soldiers? Those are all things Palestinians do to Isreal, all in the name of Allah, as if the Koran sanctions the mass murder of innocents.

These things don't happen, or rarely happen, the other way around. Why? Well, human life has a different value to the Isrealis. It has a different value to Americans. We come from a different culture, one that doesn't inculcate intolerance and hatred, not anymore. Do we have intolerance and hatred in this country? Yes, I experienced some just the other day when some drunken jackass asked me what it was like to kill thousands of people. The difference? Here, if someone drives a car into a mosque or shoots an innocent human being because he looks like he may be Arabic, society demands that we arrest and punish that person. When that jackass tries to verbally accost me, his friends drag him away, call him an idiot and apologize to me. In the West Bank, in Gaza, in other places in the Arab world, they celebrate suicide bombers and those who kill others who are different from them.

How do we react when we hear of people threatening Muslims in this country? President Bush heads to a mosque, stands side-by-side with Muslims, and condemns these acts. The newspapers run story after story on each such attack, and people try to help those in trouble. In the West Bank, in the "Palestinian homeland," Palestinians dance in the streets when they hear about the World Trade Center... and Arafat's henchmen threaten news reporters who broadcast the celebration. Arafat condemned the attack on the WTC and gave blood -- but did he ever walk out into that street in Nablus and tell those morons off? The next time some jackass strolls into an Isreali supermarket and blows up, will Arafat's so-called government track down his co-conspirators?

No, because they teach intolerance in the state-sponsered textbooks for their children; they breed their hatred and the idea that it's okay to kill Isrealis or Americans because they're different. Our country didn't create Osama bin Laden and the twisted system of beliefs that others taught him; that's like saying we created Adolf Hitler because we supported efforts to dig out the bankrupt Weimar Republic.

Hell, it sounds like Battered Wife Syndrome; we married the guy, so we must be responsible when he turns around and beats us, right? We bankrolled bin Laden and the mujaheddin in Afghanistan because we believed that they were fighting for freedom against the oppression of Communism. That didn't mean we gave them license to build an oppressive theocracy that destroys Buddhist statues and makes Hindus wear ID armbands. We fought with the USSR against Hitler and the Nazis in World War II; does that mean we built Stalin into the monster that he was, or that we wanted Communism to enslave Eastern Europe?

And don't tell me that we don't respect their culture, because killing women and babies with airplanes and bombs is not representative of a healthy culture, it's representative of a disease. Islam doesn't teach its adherents to throw down their lives and kill others in the name of God, any more than Christianity does. We don't want to kill every Muslim because of these bastards; that's like saying we want to eradicate the Germans from the face of the Earth just because most Nazis were Germans. There are plenty of decent human beings in Arab countries who don't think human life has the relative value of a spitball. As for those that do, why don't they try respecting our culture and our values? You know, values like not teaching children to hate others because of their religion. Or values like not killing innocent people by slamming jetliners into buildings.

And this gets me to my last long-winded point. You want us to re-examine our past and present political actions, and why we don't prevent slaughter in Bosnia or Rwanda. Well, we do prevent slaughters in Isreal -- if we didn't fund Isreal, how long would it take for its enemies to try to kill every last Isreali? If we did try to help those in Bosnia (and we did try there, albeit rather haphazardly) and Rwanda, or Somalia or Cambodia or Indonesia or God knows where else, someone would hate us for interfering, for imposing our will on them, for being out of place. Hey, I'm not an idiot; I know we protected Isreal for more reasons than just the fact that they're a fellow democracy. I know we built a coalition to take back Kuwait to protect our economic interests.

BUT NO ONE ELSE DID THIS, AND NO ONE ELSE TRIES TO HELP EVERYONE AS MUCH AS WE DO.

See, we're not perfect. We're flawed. We often act out of self-interest as a country, whether that interest be money, power, the President's need to get a hummer (yes, I can't leave Hillary's husband alone... like she does), whatever. We make mistakes. We trust and support the wrong people sometimes. Other times, we don't support or help the right people enough.

BUT WE TRY, DAMMIT.

Name one country, one culture, one civilization, that rebuilt its enemies and saved them from starvation following a war. The answer is the United States of America, through the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Japan and Western Europe, friend and foe alike (we even offered it to the Commies, who turned us down).

Name the nation that provides the bulk of humanitarian aid in the world, the vast majority of it, even to countries who are its sworn enemies and wish it harm. The answer is the United States of America, whether through dollars or through its people.

I've been abroad, I've traveled in Europe and Asia, I've studied other cultures, and I can say this unequivocally: there's more freedom and opportunity in a ten-mile stretch of the worst slums in the United States then there are in most entire countries around the globe.

Do we fuck up sometimes? Yes.

Do we impose our will on others? Damn straight.

Do we do things in our own self-interest? Wow, what a human quality.

But we succeed, and we prosper, and we grow, and we benefit mankind. We disagree on a lot of things (this e-mail's proof positive of that), but we use that disagreement to strengthen ourselves, to make ourselves stronger. We grant people the freedom to be religious or not, informed or ignorant, to be silent or opinionated, to be tolerant or intolerant, to be any damn thing they want to be.

We open our doors (less quickly than before, but still) to millions of people from other places every year, so that they can achieve their dreams in a place that cultivates dreamers.

We sometimes treat people badly or unfairly, but no one else works as hard to remedy those instances.

We promote our culture, but it spreads for a simple reason: WE ARE GOOD.

That's probably jingoistic, but that doesn't make it less true. Our culture threatens others because they understand the attractiveness of freedom, and know it threatens their interests. That is why they denigrate us, why they hate us and ultimately why they attack us. It's not rational until you realize that evil attacks good simply because good exists.

That's why the fanatics in the Middle East label us the Great Satan. We threaten them because we promote freedom and tolerance and love. They promote oppression and bigotry and hate. Their own culture doesn't want them, but they try to appear strong by forcing their values on others. And when when they run across something they can't bully or force into submission, they grow angry, they grow threatened and they lash out, and you see the result. Quite simply, these assholes are EVIL.

And Evil always attacks Good. Good doesn't deserve the attack or cause it; Evil must tear down Good simply because it exists.

But Good always wins. And so will we.

We may kill some who are innocent in the process. The difference? We will go in afterwards and try to help the survivors rebuild their own society, rather trying to eradicate every last one of them. And we'll screw up some, and someone will call us on it, and we'll try to correct it.

And in the end, the world will be a better place because of us.

7 years ago today. Don't forget.