As I have for the last several years, I showed my history classes the short documentary "Twin Towers." While the title suggests it's all about the WTC-9/11 event, it's actually not.
It was originally going to be about the people who work in the NYC Emergency Services Unit. These people take on the tougher assignments like SWAT functions, but also tasks like water and suicide-attempt rescues, building collapses, etc. As you can imagine, they were front and center on 9/11 trying to get people out of the WTC complex and lost 14 of their 34 person unit; a devastating blow to some of the Big Apple's finest.
I show it because it will easily fit inside a normal class period and because it is apolitical. It really doesn't even identify the hijackers at all. And most of the end of the film focuses on the devastating impact on the men and families of the unit, and particularly on one family, whose other son, a FDNY fireman, also died on 9/11.
The title comes from a suggestion by a reporter at the time who referred to the two brothers as "the twin towers." The film won the 2003 Oscar for documentary short, but I wonder if it would even get nominated today. We have dropped 9/11 down the memory hole. I wasn't going to show it to my senior classes but they had heard that my juniors had seen it and many of them were so young they had never seen much footage of the attacks.
Some say we avoid broadcasting the images because we don't want to whip up hatred against Muslims; others say it is because the event was used by Bush to justify a illegal war. All I can say is that those who started this war have not quit it. You don't stop until the enemy if
completely defeated.
I believe this government cannot wait to find a way to quit the war. Ignoring the threat allowed 9/11 to happen in the first place. Why do our leaders REFUSE to learn from history?
The attitude of some of the public, and arguably the US government, towards those who declared war on us that day is despairingly different from American determination in the years immediately after 9/11.
Col. Ralph Peters article in today's New York Post is one of the best I have seen. A military man, he knows too well that many of his brothers-in-arms will pay the price for the dance we are doing with our enemies and the damage in trust this is doing to our relationship with our historic friends such as England, Israel, and Japan. It's under the surface now, but they know they are being told, "You're on your own, we are too busy trying to get our population under the control of socialism to help you anymore."
Iran has just told us to go intercourse ourselves regarding their nuclear program, indicating that the President's apology tour did not bear the fruit he had hoped for. Isn't this why Obama was reticent to criticize the Iranian government's crackdown on it's huge public protests last summer? I can see that went well...
Meanwhile, our other "buddies", like
Russia and
China are treating the USA with distain. And why shouldn't they? We are racking up the national credit card to prop up our
labor unions and pay off
campaign "community organizers". Meanwhile, on the foreign scene, our national penitence act has reaped derision, not adulation.
It does no good for those of us who stood in astonishment watching a leader painfully ignorant of history as his Appeasement Tour 2009 unfolded to simply whine about what is happening. Some of us must act before we lose our country.
I am grateful to the patriots who are in Washington today speaking up against the
intentional bankrupting of the nation that the Democratic Party has instituted this year. These American citizens are using their 1st Amendment rights of peaceable assembly to put their elected representatives on notice. Congressmen and senators: ignore them at your peril; this is a MUCH bigger deal than 1994.
The policies the president is supporting will mandate a permanent dependent class reliant on government paper to keep their heads above water. After having done it to the lower classes in American society with the New Deal legislation and the Great Society socialist wealth transfer, the middle-class is now in the Statist sniperscope through "single-payer health insurance reform"; a phrase as truthful as
"peaceloving government of the People's Democratic Republic of Korea". They just gave us the same finger the Iranians did.
It will be sad if Americans are unable to pressure the Democrats in Congress to reject this government theft of wealth by preventing a "reform" bill on 17% of the American economy. I suppose I will be someday telling my children what it was like before Chairman Barry "remade" America so it would work more smoothly...with none of that bothersome dissent that he finds so distasteful.
He called it "bickering"...our founders called it things like "protected speech", "dissent", and "democracy."
Today, he said this about the "bickerers":
This is when the special interests and the insurance companies and the folks who want to kill reform fight back with everything they’ve got. This is when they spread all kinds of rumors to scare and intimidate the American people. This is what they always do.
Divide and smear...divide and smear...Nice work Mr. Hope and Change. Your Alinsky methods are doomed.
Mr. Obama...it breaks my heart to have to say it, but you are a
impugning an important interest group. They're called TAXPAYERS. This may work in Chicago...I pray it doesn't work for the rest of us.
It's time to stand up, America...or lose your liberties.
Coach
