How did 9/11 affect you? Did 9/11 change the way you look at the world or did it just reaffirm already held beliefs? For me 9/11 had real affects. I’ve been deployed and prepare to deploy again. I’ve spend more time away from my family than I want. In some ways my life feels like its on hold till the world wakes up and realizes the enemy we face. I thought I saw a bit of the America I love come out but it was short lived and my belief in the American people and especially the liberal left has plummeted. Yet I still live and work with those that know the enemy and believe in America. They will sacrifice their lives, families, and time while the sheep give up and kneel before a movement bent on our destruction and enslavement. American politics has become evermore disgusting. Every event used for purely political gains from both major parties. I am angry and my anger points in two directions not one as it should.
What has changed in America? Have we become a better nation? I don’t’ think so. Political radicals have taken hold especially on the left and serious conversations about this nation’s future seem impossible. This is a shame. While there are clear thinking individuals out there they don’t seem to have the influence of the radicals. One would have thought that after 9/11 the country would unite against a common enemy. The threat that the evidence shows is out there doesn’t seem real to many. To the radicals the enemy is America itself. To those fighting the real enemies it’s all too real and the fact that most of the United States population appears blind to them is disheartening.
“I’m sorry” seems to be the most common response I hear when people find out I’m deploying. I’m sorry also but not because I’m going but because too many left behind don’t want me (us) to win against terror, destructive ideologies and tyrants. What have we come to as a nation? The masses don’t seem to understand that if we don’t’ fight every single time we are challenged the potential to lose our very freedoms comes closer. I don’t want to see the day we finally say, “Ok let’s roll” only to find no one left with the ability to fight.
Do we have the will and desire to continue with an America based on the founding fathers and the principles of freedom and liberty? I wonder. Can we somehow convince honest men and women to run for office with the desire necessary to continue this nation’s heritage? Would you want to run in this climate? Do you have to sell your soul to get elected?
One might conclude from this post that I have little hope in America and the War on Terror and the war in Iraq. That’s not the case but I’m losing patients with my fellow countrymen who are set on destroying our own land for their limited goals. If they were to succeed do they think they would be safe? Jihadist wouldn’t be the only ones to worry about.
September 14, 2007 at 7:19 pm
One would have thought that after 9/11 the country would unite against a common enemy.
The country did, it just so happened that the common enemy was whatever was obstructing Democrat power. The same thing also obstructed Islamic Jihad power and support, so natural alliances were born.
“I’m sorry” seems to be the most common response I hear when people find out I’m deploying.
I’m sorry for the terrorists. Mayhem tends to follow in the footsteps of the SF. They are not as constrained by regular ways of doing things as the regular Army or even the Marines are. There is something to be said for such flexibility in this kind of war.
To those fighting the real enemies it’s all too real and the fact that most of the United States population appears blind to them is disheartening.
The morale is to physical as is 3 is to 1. Or in our modern times, as 10 is to 1. Enemy morale raises or at least stays the same, and there’s plenty of buffer space if it does fall. Our morale lies on a knife edge. On one side is the void and the other lies something just as scary.
Even if the American people saw what was out there, JB, it would take the use of Presidential power and the focus of the office itself, to turn the raw material and energy into anything useful. I tend to think one of the President’s duty in time of war is to maintain American morale from foreign and domestic insurgencies designed to target American morale. Which in turn, targets the morale of the armed forces of America.
In every war we would expect the enemy to hit at our logistics, centers of gravity, vulnerabilities, and morale. Without the powers invested in the President by the Constitution specifically to counter such influences, Americans that focus on America’s mortal enemies are only allowed to conduct an attritional guerrilla warfare. And that takes time, time people don’t tend to have in war.
I find little use in the blame game, same as you. It just seems to me that the American system is structured in a hierarchical manner that useful and effective action doesn’t work unless it comes from the top down. America is not a nation that can function on Ayrab tribal customs and laws, where people and soldiers simply do whatever they want and then ask for forgiveness later. We don’t live in such times, not here at least.
Rome’s experience in the 2nd Punic War is a nice scenario to go back to, in my view, since it showed Rome losing much and gaining strength and unity from such loss. America perhaps suffers from too much victory disease, JB. What is true for an army would also be true for civilians.