Abi Sutherland at Making Light nails it:
I’ve been dreading today. No matter how much the candidates say that they don’t want to politicize the anniversary, it’s going to happen on the internet. I am sure that there will be many places to remember the dead, and to debate the lessons they can teach the living.....
This thread is not for that. This thread is for defiant normality. If the aim of terrorism is to produce terror, grief and anger, then let us laugh, and rejoice, and love.
As I've said before, the real central front in the War on Terror is the Western mind. The last seven years have been one long retreat on that front.
When we give in to fear and hate,
When we start thinking that being safe means that we need to give up the freedoms that so many have fought and died for,
When we accept the idea that we need to engage in endless war against a religion the vast majority of whose members just want to get up in the morning and go to work and raise their families the same way you and I do,
Then the terrorists really have won. Worse, they've made us defeat ourselves.
It's time to turn that around.
4 comments:
Damn right, indeed.
Thank you, JD, for saying it so well. I'm tired of people thinking that fear helps. Caution, yes - fear, no. If only more people could learn and live the difference.
Thanks so much for putting the words to something that I so strongly believe. Just hope a lot of folks read this.
I have, for the longest time, wondered how you can win a war against an abstraction. There have always been terrorists, there have always been drugs, there has always been poverty. I'm not against abolishing bad things, far from it. But there is no practical way to win such "wars". You don't have a single, localized battleground. They're everywhere.
It seems to me to be a far better goal to do positive things -- get health care for people, make sure everyone's got enough food, give people (not just kids but all people) good educations.
They're all hard and they're all expensive, but I'd rather work toward something positive than dwell on fighting ephemeral and unattainable negatives.
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