Day...Oh...

     Well here it is again.  9/11 is supposed to be our rear view now, but it sneaks up on you.  You're going along more or less just fine then you realize it's that day, and once more a sickening pall descends on your soul.  There should be a statute of limitations on feeling this way, but for many of us that limit is not on the horizon.  Perhaps if I lived another fifty years the anguish might be diluted to a level similar to, for instance, indirect memories of Pearl Harbor for my generation, but probably not.
     That memorial anguish is still strong in those who were alive at the time, but that direct memory of the fear, anger, disgust, and rage engendered by Pearl Harbor is rapidly passing into the mist along with the so-called Greatest Generation.  Will those of us who consider the appalling events of 9/11 to be the signature event of our lives carry the feelings of that day to our graves?  For myself most assuredly.
     Yet for many it will not.  A lack of disgust and fear characterizes the non-feelings of, at a rough guess, nearly half the country.  You may guess which half I mean.  This can only be described as denial, a word that has unfortunately been devalued nearly into uselessness, but nevertheless it is a denial of what 9/11 meant.  And what it still means is the realization that hatred of western civilization continues unabated to this day.
     Many of the deniers contend that the events subsequent to 9/11 have caused all the trouble in the middle-east, but they conveniently forget that 9/11 was the apex of civilizational hatred, not its beginning.  If the last seventeen years had never happened they would still hate us.  Before 9/11 they hated us not because of what we had done, but because of what we are, and they still do.  Memory deniers realize this and have spent the last seventeen years attempting to rearrange our civilization more to the liking of bad actors of the radical Islamist persuasion.  It's not working, because it can't work.
     The western world will never be able to sufficiently abase itself to please Islamist militancy.  I could qualify that statement but I refuse to do so.  Make no mistake, many in our governing classes have given this abasement their best shot, but it will never work until western civilization retreats from its consensual republican roots so much that even the most committed radical leftist western civ. hater would quail before the prospect of living in such a degenerate polity.  In other words, never.
     So feel the pain of 9/11 as ye will, and endeavor to keep gimlet eyes in the watchtowers.  There is a lot riding on our civilization confidence.  In other words, everything.