Peggy Noonan: The Other Shoe

Opinion Journal ^ | 06/07/2002 | Peggy Noonan

[Pokey78]

Obsessing over Sept. 11 distracts us from preventing the next attack.

We have come to quite a pass. The nation continues on high alert as our teenagers gulp antidepressants and Osama's spokesman tells us to fasten our seatbelt. The attorney general asks if his agents could please be allowed to surf the Internet; we debate that, and whether or not it would be insensitive to fingerprint young Mideastern males trying to enter America. Palestinian terrorists kill another 17 people in another suicide bombing on another Israeli road, and Israel hits back, with Yasser Arafat under siege for a few hours.

[Pokey78]

Ping for the PNPL.

[Libertina]

I watched--we all watched--as an elderly couple, a man and woman in their 70s or 80s, were ordered out of line to be searched. They were old, frail, embarrassed. They stood 40 feet away from us, their shaky arms held wide as they were wanded by a low-wage worker not endowed with enough human grace to show them sympathy or respect. The old man and the old woman were forced to take their shoes off when everyone knew--we could see it--that it was hard for them. It is a great regret of my life, and I am ashamed of it, that I did not attempt to intervene. I knew that if I did I, dangerous middle-aged American female terror threat that I am, would cause myself the kind of trouble that would mean missing the plane and disappointing my son, who was at home waiting.
This touched a place in me of such sadness.

[TexasNative2000]

I live back home and it doesn't play well with me.

Ditto.

This entire essay may be Noonan's greatest contribution to date.

[Ditter]

She is right! I said pretty much the same thing in a post a few nights ago, not as eloquently, & not as completely. The people who lost loved ones & friends are not ready to stop greiving but the rest of us should be.

[ClancyJ]

This touched a place in me of such sadness.

Me too. Bless their hearts. They were probably terrified too and will never travel again.

This article pinpoints our situation. We should not tolerate the stupid discussions about profiling. We will profile and we will protect ourselves. If the left doesn't like it - they just don't like it. I don't like middle eastern men blowing up innocent people at their whim. I've never noticed the left caring whether I liked something or not.

[jwfiv]

Maybe the most awesome of dear Peggy's many incredible bull's eyes. Sheesh, I'm stunned by how clear her vison and writing.

Thanks for the post, Pokey78.

[ladyinred]

Here is a great irony: We are distracting ourselves from our predicament by obsessing on our tragedy. We are investigating the systems failure of Sept. 11, and while we investigate it we are contributing to the next systems failure. Every minute, every bit of energy and focus we give to Sept. 11 is stolen from the amount of time we have to concentrate on how to avoid the next Sept. 11--and what to do if we fail and it happens.

Exactly what I have been saying to anyone who will listen.
A big Bravo for Peggy, she has really hit a home run with this one.

[Russell Scott]

Some more reality for all the sheeple who have invaded and taken over a large part of FreeRepublic thinking our government can save them from going down to the pit.

Read Job chapter 33 (thats in the Bible) if you want the solution to getting off the wide path to destruction. Its great news, unlike all the crap the Bush administration has started tossing on us. Won't you come home Karen, and restore reality to the drunk on 75% poll numbers Bush adminstration.

[bybybill]

She is not only a great writer, she is a great thinker.I almost said that conservitives are luck to have her when I realised that given the way Peggy thinks, she has to be one of us.

[swheats]

I sense in her writing such an unsettling of a peace of mind and an anger that can't be explained because somebody should be fired for 9/11. This incompetence can't keep going with business as usual. Lives are at stake.

I wish I could say that Bush's speech today gives me peace of mind, unless it's just the first of many sudden changes that will set things right again.

[ReveBM]

I think there's been a sea change in the last 48 hours.

I'm not talking about Bush and his announced plan to create a Department of Homeland Security.

I'm not talking about Rush Limbaugh, who is a great talker, but he's not what the change is about.

Certain visible opinion leaders are beginning to step out in front of public opinion and demand radical changes in our domestic security structure, regarding profiling, border security, and other areas politicians and people like Tom Ridge won't touch.

I count them as follows:
Lou Dobbs mentioning Islamists.
Bill O'Reilly on border security, and today, indirectly calling for pre-emptive assassinations of terrorists (in a discussion about the CIA)
An opinion leader, I forget who, who on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page said we should pre-announce that we will nuke Mecca if a major American city is nuked
Now this piece by Peggy Noonan

Hopefully this can snowball and begin to be recognized by the popular culture.

Some people call these ideas conservative, but I think this opinion stream is going under the banner of common sense. (Conservatives would just say conservatism IS common sense).

This is one of the great things about our society, that opinion can move like this. Hopefully it will be fast enough to work that we can have something in place before the next strike. If not, hopefully the next strike will be a glancing blow and the next strike can wake up any segment of the population that has any self-preservation instincts left.

Meanwhile, idiots like Noam Chomsky prattle.

Call me superstitious if you like, but because of my religious belief, and because I believe there is a prime mover of evil in the world, a personality, Satan, I believe bad things WILL continue to happen. Possibly this will lead to the end of the world, I don't know. I just believe that because Satan is Lord of the current earth, he WILL have continued successes. We should continue to pray that the Lord will give us a protective shield.

[mercy]

Gee. Ya think maybe W will read this? Yeah right. Carl won't let him. Oh!, that we had a president that could stand up before the American people and give this very speech with passion and honest indignation. But we don't. We have a media creation invented by a committee of handlers.

[Fracas]

...humans just aren't good at facing terrible things that are future things'

Elected officials are very good at second guessing past things and saying 'this is not an effort to point fingers', all the while pointing fingers.

[Scott from the Left Coast]

A brilliant (and prescient) offering from Ms. Noonan.

This is what 40 years of flower-power-hippie-love-smoke-that-doobie philosophy has left us: Afraid to defend ourselves for it will make us appear hard and uncompassionate to our enemies.

And, gee, it's all our fault for oppressing the noble savages anyway, so we deserve to die. Seem like an outrageously over-the-top statement? If you polled our glorious institutions of higher education nationally, solid majorities would opine that we do deserve it. It reminds me of the famous Oxford student vote in the mid 1930's, where the flower of British youthful intelligensia declared overwhelmingly that they would not fight in a war to defend their country. Hitler took note of that fine little exercise in academic freedom. Our enemies are watching us in the same manner today

If another shoe does drop in NY or D.C., my fervent hope is that the only casualties are the staunch Mr. Bloomberg who opined recently that even if another 9/11 were to occur because of it, he would still oppose profiling because that was a greater evil than mass murder, and the ever-correct Mr. Mineta. They, at least, really would deserve it.

[Timesink]

The New York Times puts a plain recounting of New York's vulnerabilities to nuclear attack on the cover of its Sunday magazine...

Anyone know if this article has been published yet? It's not in last Sunday's NYT Magazine, and media society inner-circle New Yorkers like Peggy get next Sunday's issue delivered to them by hand the Wednesday before.

[Pokey78]

Nuclear Nightmares

It was in the 5/24 edition of the NYT Magazine.

[ReveBM]

I think the NYT magazine article mentioned was from 2 weeks ago, with a yellow cover if I remember correctly. It was a think piece about five pages in length. Basically, what it left me with was that the author's idea was that "the best evidence that a nuclear attack on New York won't happen is that one hasn't happened already". There was a lot of other less-than-nuke-explosion stuff that was pretty nasty too.

[Timesink]

Thanks Pokey!