Neil Cavuto commentary--"War on Pessimism"--Great Read!!

Your World w/ Neil Cavuto--Fox News Channel ^ | 2003 Mar 25 | Neil Cavuto

[Nitro]

That was great, often I don't watch the entire Cavuto Show because I am poor and he talks about all the money I don't have. I imagine this is his closing "rant" (for lack of a better word) and those are excellent.

At any rate, here is an article I have been saving, I might have posted it at the time, but it helped me get back to thinking as a winner instead of being a victim. Pass it along if you think it's worthwhile.

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The Day Everything Stayed The Same

Curmudgeon Emeritus -- Francis W. Porretto

September 10, 2002

One year.

A year of shock, rage, mourning, and more than perfunctory introspection and self-criticism, not all of it necessary or wise.

All the major media outlets are doing treatments of Black Tuesday for its anniversary, and on one point they're unanimous: it was "the day everything changed." A noncontroversial point, one everyone knows. And like a lot of other noncontroversial things that everyone knows, it's dead wrong.

To show how wrong it is, all we need do is unpack it, break it down into specifics.

The Black Tuesday atrocities killed about 3000 Americans. They destroyed about $15 billion in property and caused an estimated $100 billion in total economic losses. With no intent to denigrate the losses, nor belittle the agony of the victims or the grief of their families, I note that our armed forces inflicted many times that much damage in individual sorties, during World War II and the 1991 Persian Gulf War -- then came back to do it again the next day.

America's reaction to the unprecedented assault was:

To pursue al-Qaeda militarily and topple its protector, the Taliban regime of Afghanistan;
To allow the FBI greater latitude in wiretapping;
To establish a new Cabinet Office for Homeland Security
To intensify security procedures at our airports.

Virtually no one in the United States has endured more than occasional, fleeting inconvenience as a result of these things. In defiance of my prediction of a year ago, we still congregate in large, nominally vulnerable groups for both work and play. Aside from a decreased willingness to fly, the average American's life has not been affected.

Osama bin Laden and his henchmen took their best shot at a country that was entirely unready for it, and America shrugged it off. If that's the worst our most bloodthirsty foe can do, Americans' attitude of confidence would seem well justified.

The consequences to our international relations have been slight. America is still the world's power, unchallengeable in any arena where it cares to assert itself. Europe and the Muslim Middle East still resent us for our military might, cultural influence, and commercial success. Communist China still seeks a way to challenge our police protection of its neighbors, notably Taiwan. Russia is still a muddle, and Japan is too busy trying to dig out from under its economic wreck to be of current concern.

On the domestic scene, we still have a sharply divided Congress and a "disloyal opposition" that will pull any maneuver, however low or tawdry, to frustrate the Bush Administration's economic and judicial agenda. To their credit, Dubya and his appointees have maintained near-perfect civility and unshaken determination to do what they believe right. Leftists still keep a tight grip on the schools and colleges, but are slipping into irrelevance everywhere else.

The "battle of ideas" hasn't been affected at all. The Left insists that we should be tolerant and understanding of the divergent ways of others, even when those ways reap innocent lives in New York, Washington, or Jerusalem. The Left also wants to blame the Bush tax cuts for our current economic doldrums and federal deficit. The Right wants to laugh, but the matter has proved too serious for that.

The Right is still pushing for the reinvigoration of the military and the foreign-intelligence services. Some on the Right want to erect a security state with a full-blown secret police apparatus and the capacity to monitor all communications traffic of any kind, both domestic and international, but they wanted that before Black Tuesday, too. The rationale has simply changed from drugs to terrorism.

So what's really changed, and by how much?

Americans are more willing to express patriotism and religious belief, and to question political and religious creeds that suppress the individual or exhort him to suppress his own rights and interests in favor of some collectivist doctrine. In particular, Islam has come under serious scrutiny, as have the cultures where it predominates. There is an increasing, and increasingly disapproving, understanding of the tenets of this "religion," which preaches conversion by the sword, prescribes appalling secular penalties for minor misdemeanors and entirely private deeds, licenses its adherents to commit violence and deceit against the "infidel" whenever convenient, and aims for total political control of the world.

Americans are aware, as never before, that hatred of our ideals is nothing to be ignored, that a charismatic malefactor with followers, funds, and fortitude can transmute them into destruction. Perhaps we knew it intellectually, but the collapse of the Twin Towers drove it home emotionally to a depth from which it will never be expelled.

Americans are freshly aware of the heroism that slumbers in our professional protector cadres: our police, our emergency workers, and our brilliant all-volunteer military. Like the rest of us, under normal circumstances they look after their own interests first. But when catastrophe came to call, they ran toward it and never looked back. A tragic number of them will never get a chance to look at anything else, ever again.

Americans are aware that even the most ordinary man can rise to greatness, as the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93, the sole hijacked plane that failed to reach its target, proved a year ago.

Perhaps these are large changes, after all. But they are cognitive and attitudinal: recognitions and acknowledgements of what is and has been for two centuries, unaffected by any partisan polemic or refusal to see: the rightness of individual liberty, impartial justice, and the spirit of private initiative and voluntary cooperation, whether to build, heal, protect or punish.

The rightness of America.