A NOT SO CIVIL WAR

By Simon Pedenko

On Tuesday, the 11th day of September, the unimaginable came to pass. In less than two hours our universe cracked and split apart. We witnessed, smelled, and tasted the devastation of war on U.S. soil. We were forced to confront the meaning of the word atrocity and spend years trying to understand it.

Americans felt shock, horror, grief, and rediscovered patriotism. Spiritual aid streamed in by way of the prayers of millions around the world in their churches, temples and synagogues. Here in the states, all races and persuasions came together and jammed into Red Cross corridors to offer blood for the WTC victims. Wherever I looked, our Stars and Stripes waved proudly atop commercial buildings, homes, schools, and all types of land vehicles from two- to twenty-wheelers.

I was awe-inspired and uplifted, but ultimately sad. Sad, because I knew in my core that such passion would eventually diminish like fog at sunrise, and everyone (or at least the liberal half of us) would fall back into their comfortable “blame mindset.”

By mid-October 2001, high-ranking Democrats began spewing vitriol at President George W. Bush, as though he personally had ordered the deaths of the thousands on 9/11. Neither truth nor special commissions, or common sense and logic, have dissuaded these detractors one iota. The Left were and still are blindly determined to destroy this president. At every opportunity they overrule and undermine the President’s efforts to protect our nation from further attacks.

As a result, the Left have successfully pitted Americans against Americans. I no longer know which is worse: the crashing of the planes by insane terrorists, or the out-and-out enmity we face from our own countrymen—our neighbors, even family members.

I fear we are on the threshold of a second American civil war, only this time the ammunition is not cannons or pistols. This time they are misguided missiles, and they’re being fired at us via the mainstream media. Be it disclosure of national security secrets (cloaked under the guise of “Freedom of Speech”) or spin for the sake of spinning, it is without conscience or consideration to consequence. Their actions and reporting are wholly irresponsible.

Senator Barbara Boxer said: “Terrorism is the result of this (Iraqi) war.” While acts of terror have increased in Iraq, from a pre-war level of nearly zero to the current daily tally, one could argue that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was never targeted by terrorists because Saddam supported, financed and encouraged terrorists. It was only after regime change, and the Iraqis’ embrace of democracy, that terrorist acts in Iraq began. Senator Boxer also conveniently forgets the first attack on the World Trade Center, the suicide attack on the USS Cole, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, and countless other acts of murder, highjacking and terror stretching back to the Munich Olympics in 1972. All of these occurred without the “provocation” of the Iraq war.

Imprudent statements from the Left have split our country, our camaraderie, and our best hopes for America. Together with terrorists exploiting every crack in our resolve and every difference between our leaders, every pessimistic forecast from the media experts becomes precisely fertile ground ideal for invasion. The terrorists play to the cameras, whether they are beheading a kidnapped journalist or filming the detonation of an IED for Al Jazeera. They know that with every televised and web-posted outrage, a few more Americans will lose their taste for the fight, give in to the hopelessness and despair, and petition their leaders to just quit and go home. They can’t win in the field—they can only hope to survive longer than our national will to prevail.

Everyone knows our country’s motto: E Pluribus Unum: “From Many, One.” Thanks to aggressive idiocy on the part of certain politicians, partnered with reckless and slanted news reporting by a biased media, it is conceivable that our motto may descend to E Pluribus Nusquam: “From Many, Nothing.”