9/11; Let's Not Forget What We Should Not Forget

It has been nine years since the coordinated homicidal attacks on the World Trade Center, on the Pentagon, and possibly on the capitol, which was commendably thwarted by heroic passengers to plop into a field in Pennsylvania. And we, of course, should never forget. But there are many things we should never forget.

We should not forget our regime of liberty, which was spawned from and during emergency, which found its ultimate voice in the Constitution. The Constitution, born of emergency, axiomatically does not admit of emergency exceptions. That was a point that eluded the Bush Administration, and which seems to be forgotten by the Obama one too. We do not inspire others elsewhere to embrace constitutional government by flouting its teachings and standards here. If the Bush theory that turbaned hooligans in distant lands wanted to destroy our way of life by this attack and by other measures was correct, then the assault on civil liberties here, which was installed by thoughtless and hysterical [or maybe calmly purposeful?] sorts in the Bush administration, has given the thugs the victory that we thought we were preventing by our illegal invasion of other sovereign lands without congressional declaration.

And even though we need to pay our respects to the horrors and deaths and sacrifices of 9/11, we must desist from the apparently increasing vogue of yearly ritual victimization ceremonies, which are both morbid and unhelpful to the advancement of legitimate values.

Let’s rebuild the Twin Towers [after we get a lucid and scientifically valid explanation of how the curiously unmentioned third tower collapsed when it was not hit by a plane!], let’s start to mind our own business around the globe, and let’s start to recall what the Founding Fathers intended when they launched their marvelous experiment of popularly sovereign governance in Philadelphia. That is what we really must not forget and what we should celebrate yearly with vigor and appreciation and resolve.