Posted on 09/10/2002 12:59:02 PM PDT by shaggy eel
The first country to see the light of each new day, after the Kingdom of Tonga, is New Zealand. September 11 2002 is happening as I write this. Already today, a dawn parade commemorating last year's tragedy has passed in our largest city, Auckland. Yachties will know this city as the present home of the America's Cup. Today though, only one thought was in mind as OLD GLORY was raised to half mast on the most important flagpole atop of Auckland's harbour bridge.
Services of Rememberance are scheduled throughout New Zealand today, one of which will be attended by US Ambassador Charles "Butch" Swindells, at St Paul's Cathedral in Wellington. Additionally, he will plant a tree in the grounds of the American Embassy in the central Wellington suburb of Thorndon this morning with New Zealand's Prime Minister to mark the first anniversary of September 11.
At 8,46am (46 minutes from now), the Orpheus Choir will start a recital of Mozart's Requiem, starting a world recital to be carried on in different cities around the globe as the day unfolds.
Go, All Blacks!
Hoepfully it was raised to full staff, then lowered to half staff.
At end of day, raised to full staff and lowered.
ofMagog, looks like you left Aukland a little to quickly. Prepare to come-about. :^)
I'm sick to death of form over substance.
I'm tired of seeing all these "let's hold hands and break into'I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing'" sentiments everywhere.
I don't care about what some choir somewhere is doing to "commemorate" 9/11. I don't care about whether or not artistes can finally capture our national--nay, international angst. I don't care about the emotions.
I'm not an "artist," so I don't care about suffering. I care about justice and peace.
And both those words, too, are being misused horribly, now and for the past twelve months. Or actually, for about the last forty years.
While we're all getting gooey and weepy about what happened a year ago, we're ignoring some very important FACTS:
1) The rest of the world HATES us. Or at the very least, they openly support us with a bunch of flowery words while wishing that something, ANYTHING, even terrorism, will "cut us down to size" so they don't have to deal with us any more.
That's mostly because while we sit here whining about how our "freedoms" are being "violated" in the U.S., we don't bother to notice that compared to the rest of the world, we're the Wild, Wild West. Most of the world is not just CREEPING toward socialism; they are ABJECT socialists.
Jeffrey Archer, former Tory MP in Britain and a sometime author of mystery novels, said in a radio interview I once heard, that at that time (the mid-80s) the British Conservative Party was about the equivalent of liberal Democrats here in the U.S.
Yet we so want "approval" of these people, whether you're talking Australia or Zimbabwe. We want them to "like" us; we want them to give us "permission" to protect ourselves, pretty please.
We have funded three-quarters of the world for about three generations, and we have to listen to a non-stop stream of vile rhetoric--and I'm just talking about our "friends"; just think what our ENEMIES have to say about us.
2) We have a significant minority of our population--and a plurality of the political class--that hates us every bit as much as the socialist "democracies" of Europe do. And they have done NOTHING, since about one week after the 9/11 attacks, but obstruct and hinder and use for political gain, any attempt by the Bush administration to fight and KILL our enemies.
These are people who see the United States of America, freedom, republican government (which was designed to frustrate the plutocratic elites), free enterprise and capitalism as the sum total reason for all the world's ills.
These same people are ALSO co-opting the hippy-dippy "commemorations" that will take place tomorrow.
This is the class of "citizen" who tried to make sure a statue erected in memory of the FDNY flag-raising had "minority representation". The same that harrassed and castigated the young African Christian student at UCLA for daring to upbraid the group of Arab students who were sitting around in the library laughing it up about 9/11; the same people who instead of worrying about how to fight an enemy that operates in total subterfuge, infiltrating our free society with impunity, wants to make sure we don't "racially profile" (and therefore you are more likely to be strip-searched if you are an elderly white woman than if you are a young Middle Eastern woman with a head-covering).
These same people who want to stand shoulder to shoulder with the rest of us to "remember" 9/11, in reality want us to remember it is all OUR FAULT.
3) Al-Qaeda, and the rest of radical Islam, is still out there plotting our destruction. This thing isn't over, but we're being constantly told by ALL of the above that "hate" is not the answer, and "force" never solved anything--a patent lie if there ever was one.
So no, I'm really not in the mood for a sappy, drippy "commemoration", not while the war is still raging.
I'd love to know what our World War II generation did on December 7, 1942. After all, at that time the war in the Pacific was REALLY raging, and our soldiers were slugging it out in North Africa.
Did they all drop their weapons, their crescent wrenches and their welding masks so they could all link arms and sing "Kumbaya"?
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think not. I think everyone was far too busy trying to whip the ASSES of the blood-thirsty and relentless tyrants who had vowed to destroy us from the face of the earth.
Sorry, I'm not doing any celebrating tomorrow. I'm not participating in any commemorations.
The day we have Saddam Hussein's head on a pike; the day that we begin the mass Nuremburg-like trials of all the Wahabbists and radical Islamist leaders on the way to hanging the lot of 'em, that's the day I'll take some time to "remember."
That's the day that the job will be done, and I'll feel like we've earned the right to sit and ponder.
If a bomb goes off in the midst of one of our namby-pamby "memorial celebrations," killing a few hundred more of our fellow citizens, maybe that'll be what it takes to bring everyone to the realization that life has CEASED being a DreamWorks SKG production.
I appreciate your comments, but think they are misplaced with NZ.. They have substantively contributed to the War on Islamists and will no doubt continue to do so. Now France on the other hand....
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