And so we have come upon the seventh anniversary of Black Tuesday.

Seven years may seem like a long time, and it certainly does for those who, ably aided by the relentless propaganda from the Democrats and the MSM, have been convinced that The Long War “really isn’t all that big a deal” and, at any rate, “there are more important things happening right now”, such as the price of bread at the grocery store.

There are around 3,000 souls who don’t give a flip about their grocery bills or the housing bubble. They’d love to give a flip, I’m sure, but they’re unable to, thanks to others who didn’t give a flip about the rising threat of islamic fundamentalism. Instead, they’re left wondering how many more souls must join them in Heaven before their countrymen left on Earth start taking the threat seriously.

You see, the thing about wars is that, unless you start them, you don’t get to pick which ones you want to participate in, no matter how inconvenient for your scheduled mall trips they may be. They pick you. “What would happen if there was a war and nobody showed up?” The ones who stayed at home would be massacred in their beds, in their living rooms or in their offices, that’s what would happen.

One would think that we’d learned that lesson on 9/11, and for a while it seemed like we had. Then, thanks to a lack of message control from the White House coupled with a massive propaganda effort from the MSM and their political allies in the Democrat party, a lot of us got busy unlearning it.

“There isn’t really a threat.” Tell that to the loved ones of the 3,000 who were murdered that September morning by a non-existent threat.

“The GOP is making it all up, exaggerating things just to make you vote for them.” I suggest that if somebody had been “exaggerating” a bit prior to 9/11, it might never have happened. At any rate, if reminding people of the very real war that we’re in, whether we like it or not, encourages people to vote GOP, then you have to wonder why that is. It’s most likely because people know that one side is determined to fight back, and the other side isn’t. After all, if both sides were equally determined to fight equally hard, it really wouldn’t make any difference in the polls whether we remember that we’re in a fight or not.

The Democrats and their allies in the MSM know full well that they have zero credibility when it comes to defending this nation of ours, which is exactly why they’ve spent 7 years trying to convince us that there’s no war to be fought, that it can all be solved with talks, hugs and running away and maybe, maybe, if the situation is really grave, by issuing a warrant for the arrest of the perpetrators.

That didn’t work so well in the past, now did it? It won’t work now either. Trust me on that one. History has a nasty habit of repeating itself when people refuse to learn from their earlier mistakes, and the butcher’s bill has a tendency of being higher than the last time every time it does.

In spite of this, the left and the MSM have been investing every ounce of their energy, not in helping to eradicate a threat that dates back 1,400 years and that has no intentions of going away until we do, permanently, but in undermining, sabotaging and hindering the war effort. Not because they love terrorists, they’re not that insane, but because they love power more than they love their own country and her people. So obsessed are they with grasping the government power that they feel entitled to that they’d happily see us defeated with massive loss of life if it would put one of their own in the White House. We’ve seen it with the campaign in Iraq. Since before it even started they’ve been working hard to make the job of our troops and their leaders harder and more costly than it ever needed to be. For years we’ve heard about the “quagmire” and the “unwinnable war”, for years we’ve heard all of the bad news, exaggerated wildly for effect, and absolutely NONE of the good. For years we’ve seen our covert efforts sabotaged by being published on the front page of the New York Times, for all of our enemies to read about.

All because a defeat over there would mean a slap in the face to the Evil Republicans and, so they hope, a better result at the polls for themselves. The thousands that have died as a result? As their friend, the Chief Kostard would say: “Screw ‘em.”

Think it hasn’t made a difference? Think again. We’re in the fifth year of the Iraqi campaign, and only now is victory in sight. a little over 6 decades ago, we defeated three enemy major powers in FOUR years.

And no, we can’t just “go home.” I mean, we certainly can go home, but that won’t end the war. Wars are ended in one of two ways: In victory or in defeat. There is no Door #3, and it doesn’t matter who started it. All that matters is who will end it. It doesn’t matter if you’ve lost interest in the war, because the war hasn’t lost interest in you. It will follow you wherever you go. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a respite, you’ll get a while where it’ll seem as if everything’s over and then, out of the clear blue sky, you’ll find out that it isn’t over at all.

Such as a clear blue Tuesday morning sky, in case you’ve forgotten.

If we go back to a 9/10 mindset, the only thing that we are sure to get in return is another 9/11.

Yes, war is horrible, and none of us want to find ourselves in one. Every single one of us would dearly love for it all to “go away.”

The WWII generation didn’t “want” that war, but they rolled up their sleeves and fought it, because they knew that the only way to make it go away was for them to do so, and to continue doing so until its victorious conclusion.

The WWI generation didn’t “want” that war either.

Nor did the Civil War generation.

You can argue that the Founding Fathers’ generation picked their war, although it’s unclear to any rational, freedom-loving person how they could have possibly continued to quietly suffer the indignities and oppression of the British Crown and call themselves men, but once that war was on, they were faced with the same hard choices as generations to come: You either win, or you lose.

There IS no Door #3.

So it doesn’t really matter how frightfully inconvenient this war that we’ve been saddled with is. It doesn’t matter how much it cramps our style, how much we’d rather not be in it and how much we’d rather go about our peaceful business. We’re in it, and the only choice we have is whether we, like generations before us, will stand up and face that challenge, or simply sit down and accept defeat.

If we choose the latter, we will not only have earned the eternal haunting of those 3,000 souls of 9/11 whose deaths will then be unavenged and meaningless, we’ll have thrown away the prize that was earned by generation upon generation who fought and died before them. We will have proven ourselves unworthy of the gift that our Founding Fathers and every generation that came after them left for us to inherit.

Not only will the dead of 9/11 and every one of our men and women who have fallen on the field of honor since that day have died in vain, so will the dead of the Ardennes, Omaha beach, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Belleau Wood, Gettysburg, Yorktown and every single other battle in which Americans have fought and died throughout the history of our nation.

Those are the stakes, that is the choice that we’re facing.

All of us, not just those overseas fighting right now. All of us. Because we’re all Americans, we all have a role to play, we all have a responsibility to see this through to the victorious end or, failing that, to die trying.

America needs to come back from the mall and realize that, or there pretty soon won’t be a mall to go to.

Remember: There are only two options in war. We can win, or we can lose. Losing is much easier, since it requires nothing of us. All we have to do is to do nothing at all. Follow that course, and the war will come visit us again, as it did 7 years ago. And it will keep visiting us until there’s nothing left to visit.

This war will not be over until islamic fundamentalism has been crushed, the way we crushed Japanese imperialism and Nazism. Tall order? You betcha. Don’t think that the Greatest Generation weren’t overwhelmed by the amount on their plate either, but that didn’t stop them. They didn’t have a choice if they wanted there to be an America for their children and grandchildren to inherit, and neither do we.

What we need to concern ourselves with right now is not the magnitude of the task ahead of us, the seemingly impossible odds that we’re up against and the sheer amount of fighting that we must yet do to see this through to victory. It is what it is, and it’s not going to change. What we need to concern ourselves with is this:

Do we fight, no matter what the duration and the cost, and thus leave an America for our children and grandchildren to inherit, do we pick up that torch that generations of Americans before us have passed on to us, do we accept that responsibility, no matter how many tears we must shed and how much blood we must spill?

Or do we refuse to accept that burden and thus declare ourselves unworthy and undeserving of the gift we have been given?

We are no different than, we no better than, and we have no more of a “right” to a life free of struggle and sacrifice than the generation who woke up on December 7th, 1941 to the realization that times were going to be tough for a while.

And if we, as a nation, have come to the point where we think that we are, then we deserve what we’ll inevitably get, and none will shed a tear over our passing. Nor should they. Such tears would be wasted on the unworthy curs who threw away two centuries of sacrifice and history because they couldn’t be bothered to rise up and accept their responsibilities as heirs to the greatest nation that ever existed.

It would be better, and certainly more fitting, if we were forgotten entirely, should we shame ourselves and our ancestors in that way.

NEVER FORGET!
NEVER FORGIVE!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 10:15 AM and is filed under Imperial Thoughts, The Long War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.