I didn’t mean the word “ambivalent” as a negative. It’s a day of conflicting emotions for everyone. Maybe ambivalent is the wrong word.

The unease has infected America.

Dr. Walid Phares said today we’re still confused:

Rarely over the past eight years have we received good clear answers. Our debate was hopelessly disabled by large segments of our own political establishment, which advocated exaggerated apology; our public perception was outmaneuvered by the Jihadist propaganda worldwide. For years any clear identification of the enemy, its ideology, its strategies and how to counter them has been lacking.

Unfortunately, in the years after the 9/11 war began, most academic and some media elite and, most recently and stunningly, top advisors on national security continued to affirm that Jihad is just some Islamic equivalent of yoga. Despite the mobilizing Presidential speeches of earlier years in this conflict, the bureaucratic machine didn’t fight this war; in fact it pushed it to fail and eventually crumble.

I’m not giving up or giving in, but like Elizabeth, I feel a need to turn inward a bit, to get some bearings, before I come out with all barrels blazing!

I recall, years ago when we were toppling the Taliban rule in Afghanistan, the Taliban leader Mullah Omar whining to some journalist that we should “Get over it!”.

To which my response must be not only “No!”, but “Hell No!!!”.

Like many, I was at work on that day, learning of it when co-workers told me to check out CNN on the internet, and watched it play out, watching with horror when the buildings collapsed with so many still inside.

The next day, Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, normally a fairly angry liberal wrote a column ( reproduced at WTC Trbute – We’ll Go Forward From this Moment ) in which he observed…

Let me tell you about my people. We are a vast and quarrelsome family, a family rent by racial, social, political and class division, but a family nonetheless. We’re frivolous, yes, capable of expending tremendous emotional energy on pop cultural minutiae — a singer’s revealing dress, a ball team’s misfortune, a cartoon mouse. We’re wealthy, too, spoiled by the ready availability of trinkets and material goods, and maybe because of that, we walk through life with a certain sense of blithe entitlement. We are fundamentally decent, though — peace-loving and compassionate. We struggle to know the right thing and to do it. And we are, the overwhelming majority of us, people of faith, believers in a just and loving God.

Some people — you, perhaps — think that any or all of this makes us weak. You’re mistaken. We are not weak. Indeed, we are strong in ways that cannot be measured by arsenals.

And concluded with…

So I ask again: What was it you hoped to teach us? It occurs to me that maybe you just wanted us to know the depths of your hatred. If that’s the case, consider the message received. And take this message in exchange:

But you’re about to learn.

THIS is how I’ll remember 9/11, for a VERY long time to come.

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