We again mark the terrorist attacks launched upon us on September 11, 2001.
We again remember the dead from those attacks – and we remember and recall the memories of those who have died fighting terrorism since we decided to go after those who would destroy our way of life if given the chance.
The wars in Iraq, and even more so in Afghanistan are all about American will and resolve.
It is all about a nation willing to make sacrifices of its children and of its assets in order to allow democracy to prevail over tyranny.
Our willingness to fight on at incredible cost to ourselves is a great and lasting mark on our people.
We debate about whether we should retreat and say forget it.
We debate about moving on with greater intensity to achieve the ultimate victory of light over darkness.
There is no debate necessary about America holding the light and of the terrorists bringing on the darkness.
The brave men and women in our armed forces dying in Iraq and in Afghanistan have never been held in higher regard by the nation. Our strength as a people is their strength. Our resolve is their resolve. Our continued willingness as a nation to take the fight to the enemy allows them to move forward in the face of bullets and bombs.
We could be as the French people were after Hitler invaded Poland.
They didn’t care – and they believed they were stronger than the Germans because they had a better culture and a grander military history.
But the French ultimately did not want to fight, could not stop the German onslaught when it finally came, and put their possessions and materialism before any thoughts of heroism.
The French army folded because the French army felt the energy of the French people – and so the army did not feel like dying for the rich who would just as soon take Hitler rather than a war in order to preserve their wealth – and let the working class do its bidding.
They gave the Nazis their nation rather than lose their homes and farms, their factories and their banks, their art work and their universities and their beloved Paris.
They gave the Nazis their nation and believed they could live in peace with the Nazis. They figured they could deal with the Nazis and Hitler and get a better deal from them than from the socialists who wanted to tax the rich into the ground, who cared nothing for the French workingman or soldier.
When the Nazis took over France, they raped the French nation. It was too late when the French realized they should have fought.
Americans are being taxed into the ground but we continue to fight against those dedicated to our eradication.
It is a more difficult fight than we have known as a nation as the terrorists are not nations. They do not have standing armies. They plot destruction. They come and go like ghosts and melt into the general population. They commit atrocities against their own and live to do the same against us.
They are vile people and they are dangerous to the history of mankind, let alone to American Democracy.
So America fights on. We debate the value of the fight but as a nation, we are a people with a spine and with a long history of not retreating from responsibility.
American soldiers and sailors go out to fight everyday and to die.
But there is the belief that American resolve and heroism can halt the evil forces lined up against us.
There is an energy here shared among the people that can be felt palpably… the same way it was felt in Britain after the fall of France and the English people lived off their resolve and their belief that they would beat the Nazis by themselves if they had to.
There are those in this nation who want to stick their heads into the sand.
However there remains a majority of us who know that we risk everything we have if we don’t remember the lessons of 9/11.
American resolve is what stands between the emerging terrorist-Muslim world and us.
Thank God for American resolve.
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