Today, I’ll be thinking less about the World Trade Center and more about my father and the relentless – probably unique – ability of New York City to bury its dead and move on without a backward glance.

My father was born in Manhattan in 1923, in a tenement building off Columbus Circle. A few years later, he moved to Brooklyn, a borough that was considered the country back then, a place that had more horses than cars. By the time he left there for good in 1966, it wasn’t the country anymore, that’s for sure.

He worked for Sea-Land, a shipping company that was one of the World Trade Center’s original tenants, and one of my very earliest memories is of my older brother and me playing in the company’s unfinished offices in one of the towers before the complex opened to the public in 1973.

Like many, probably most, New Yorkers, my father hated the Twin Towers at first, preferring the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, which had gone up during his childhood.

He’d seen King Kong when it came out in 1933, he explained, and he just couldn’t see the big ape climbing the towers. By the late ‘70s – after Philippe Petit tightrope walked across them, George Willig scaled them, Owen Quinn parachuted from them, and King Kong himself had been shot off them in a 1976 remake – he’d come around.

On a trip to Manhattan around then, he asked me if I wanted to see where he’d been born. He hadn’t been to the old neighborhood since before the war and was feeling nostalgic. We walked toward the Circle only to realize that not only the building he’d been born in was gone, but the entire street – paved over sometime in the ‘50s or ‘60s in the rush to build Lincoln Center, a place he’d never think of entering.

As the realization sunk in, he shrugged, turned to me, and said, “Well, do you wanna go see a movie instead?”

There’s nothing that will lessen the horror of 9/11 or do justice to the murdered souls interred forever at Ground Zero. But in a strange and beautiful and terrible way, New York – and America – will honor them most by pausing only briefly to pay our respects.

Written by Nick Gillespie and produced by Meredith Bragg.

Gillespie is the editor in chief of Reason.tv and Reason.com, and the co-author with Matt Welch of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America. Bragg is a producer for Reason.tv and a 2010 finalist for a digital National Magazine Award for best video.

About 2 minutes. For downloadable versions of this video, links, and other supporting materials, go to Reason.tv.

For more Reason articles and commentary on the 10-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, go here.

“…on a day when others tried to divide us, we can regain the sense of common purpose that stirred in our hearts 10 years ago. As a nation, we face difficult challenges, and as citizens in a democratic society we engage in vigorous debates about the future. But as we do, let’s never forget the lesson we learned anew 10 years ago — that our differences pale beside what unites us and that when we choose to move forward together, as one American family, the United States doesn’t just endure, we can emerge from our tests and trials stronger than before. That’s the America we were on 9/11 and in the days that followed. That’s the America we can and must always be.”
– Pres. Barack Obama, USA Today, Sept. 8, 2011

Ten year have passed since the Islamist attacks on the United States of America; attacks that killed 2,977 people in New York, Washington, DC and Shanksville, PA. Since that time we have routed the Taliban from their haven in Afghanistan, dispatched Osama bin Laden to the icy deep and lopped off many of the heads of the Islamist terror hydra. We have grown as a people to better understand the dysfunctional relationship that the Islamic theo-political dogma has with Western Culture. And we have done our best to attain closure, for ourselves, for our society and for our country.

But closure can be hard to attain when there are no bodies to bury and no pointed victory over a vanquished foe. And when closure alludes because of unresolved issues we must always re-examine the event; the moment; the realities.

At the ten year mark, an American president is foolishly stopping short of succeeding in a generational conflict with fundamentalist Islamists…or radical Islamists…or jihadists, you pick the politically correct term the Progressive-Left elitists are sanctioning as appropriate this week. To me, they are the enemy; bloodthirsty ideologues who are committed to ideological conquest by the sword in their quest to establish a global Caliphate existing under the exclusive stricture of Sharia Law. But then, that’s just me…educated on the subject and painfully realistic in my examination. You see, I dispensed with the self-imposed mental handicap of political correctness years ago…and I feel a lot better for having done so. I also see things a lot clearer without the fog of stupidity clouding every issue.

At the ten year mark, a secularist New York Mayor – along with the Progressive elites of his ilk – is advocating for the construction of a victory mosque within the footprint of the fallen World Trade Center. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg, about as self-righteous as they come, is so certain that a “kumbaya” inclusionist approach to fundamentalist Islam will heal the rift between cultures that he refuses to examine the Islamic traditions of conquest; traditions that include building great mosques over conquered lands and, in particular, conquered religious properties. One need only understand that mosques now stand over holy places meaningful to religions that existed long before Muhammad or the theo-political creed that is Islam, established in 610 A.D., to validate this reality.

Ten years on we witness an American Administration that not only sullies the relationship between the United States and its greatest Middle Eastern ally, Israel, but acts transparently in its deference to the Palestinian Movement; a movement of predominantly intolerant, and in many cases violent, Islamists who stake claim to an area that, historically, never existed. It should be noted that these Palestinian Islamists are the same people who danced in the streets of Gaza in celebration of the slaughter that took place on American soil September 11, 2001.

Ten years on we observe an American Administration completely ignoring the sanctity of free speech – a freedom guaranteed in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution – in its advocacy of a move by the Islamic and global communities (via the United Nations) to “combat” so-called Islamophobia.

Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center on Religious Freedom and a member of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, writes:

“An unprecedented collaboration between the Obama administration and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to combat ‘Islamophobia’ may lead to the de-legitimization of freedom of expression as a human right.

“The administration is taking the lead in an international effort to ‘implement’ a UN resolution against religious ‘stereotyping,’ specifically as applied to Islam.

“To be sure, the administration argues that the effort should not result in free-speech curbs. However, its partners in the collaboration, the 56 member states of the OIC, have no such qualms.

“Many OIC states police private speech through Islamic blasphemy laws that the Saudi-based OIC has long worked to see applied universally. Under Muslim pressure, Western Europe now has laws against religious hate speech that serve as proxies for Islamic blasphemy codes.”

It would seem that those who want to honestly examine and debate the grotesque contradictions presented by Muslims of a fundamentalist Islamic bent in their alleged symbiotic relationship with the West face the challenge of censorship should they dare to confront issues such as honor killings, female genital mutilation, gender equality, rights for homosexuals in the Islamic culture, freedom of religion in Islamic nations, etc.

Ten years on from the mass slaughter of September 11, 2001, and reports continuously surface about the encroachment of jihadist terror organizations into the Western Hemisphere. The Italian daily Corriere della Sera, reports that Hezbollah is setting up operations just 90 miles south of Key West, Florida, in Cuba. Reports of Hezbollah, Hamas and even al Qaeda activity in the tri-border area of South America and in Venezuela have been verified. And reports increase with each passing day of Hezbollah corroboration with Mexican drug cartels operating on the Southern border of the United States.

Ten years later and the West looks on as a so-called “Arab Spring” takes hold across the Middle East and Northern Africa. As Progressives, the uninformed and the know-nothing cheerleaders for the Obama Administration cheer the “advancement of democracy” in these lands, they ignore the inevitability that democracy in the Middle East is always subject to the organized forces that be; that the best organized factions within each “sovereign” locale will ultimately win power and, therefore legitimacy on the world stage. The gigantic problem with this all-to-soon-to-become-reality scenario is that fundamentalist Islamists are the best organized in each and every one of these locales.

In Egypt, even though many of us exclaimed the dangers of the Muslim Brotherhood, the mainstream media, along with the Obama Administration and the Progressive Movement, celebrated democracy in the aftermath of Mubarak. Today we witness the Muslim Brotherhood threatening the Egyptian military not to interfere in the crafting of a new constitution.

In Lybia, even though many of us warned that Libyan rebels had extensive ties to jihadists groups including al Qaeda and offshoots that waged war against US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama Administration, along with the presiding governments in Britain and France, advocated for NATO operations to support the terrorist affiliated groups over the clown prince Qaddafi. Today, these rebels not only have Qaddafi’s money, they have his SA-24 heat-seeking missiles and, some fear, his stockpile of chemical weapons.

Ten years on…

In 2006, I wrote of Jonathan Briley. Mr. Briley is better known in his death as “The Falling Man” of the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks. I wrote then:

“The mainstream media in the United States has taken the images of September 11th, 2001 off the television and out of the newspapers. They say that the images are too disturbing, that they incite a want for revenge rather than allow closure. But they are wrong to do this.

“The United States should not and cannot simply forgive and forget just because the host country of the Taliban and al Qaeda – Afghanistan – has been liberated and transformed. Facts demonstrate that al Qaeda, the Taliban and radical Islam have been planning and preparing to implement their global campaign of terrorism – their declared war against the Western World – since before 1993, well before September 11th. Their central location for training may have been eliminated but they had prepared for that, splintering like roaches to the four corners of the world, preparing, planning and implementing their battle plans made decades before.

“Make no mistake, they are a cunning adversary. They understood that the US would come after them. They planned for this event.

“This war cannot be about ‘tolerance’ or forgiving, or about understanding the ‘reasons why’ someone would want to murder innocents whether it be with an airplane, a car bomb, a suicide vest or a saif. This battle has to be about freedom and the right of innocents to live their lives in liberty, free of fear from an unholy sect of genocidal totalitarians who offer only oppression, dominance and terror as their bounty…”

With all of the appeasement the West has offered the radical, fundamentalist Islamist community, with all of the advances made by jihadists around the world, with Islamists pressuring governments around the world, from Britain to the Netherlands, Spain to Germany and the United States, to coddle their barbarity; to provide inclusion for their totalitarian theocratic ideology, can we truly say that Jonathan Briley has received any semblance of justice, that his family has attained any modicum of closure? Only the radically dense would answer yes.

So, as we watch the secular commemorations of the ten year passing of the attacks on our country by radical Islamists, fundamentalist Muslims, jihadis, or, if you have dispensed with political correctness as I have, the scum of the Earth, ask yourself: do you feel safer today than Jon Briley did at fifteen seconds after 9:41am, on September 11, 2001? I know I don’t.

New industrial and information technologies were annihilating distance, uniting mankind and globalizing the world economy. The English language had leaped far beyond its island home, and now knit together hundreds of millions of people on four continents. Medical advances were rapidly stretching the human lifespan, while new agricultural methods offered hope of eradicating hunger. Research, science, and philosophies of progress had weakened the hold of religion in countries that once had fought bloody doctrinal conflicts and persecuted dissenters. Transnational organizations in defense of human rights were striving with rising success to eliminate evils like forced labor and torture, and reform movements in once-tyrannical countries promised to gradually introduce democracy. Man had become, more than ever before, the measure of all things, and political philosophers predicted with confidence that mankind’s self-destructive history was drawing to an end; we had entered a new and perhaps the final phase of human development, an age of reason. The sun that dawned that morning shone bright as all our hopes in a sky almost clear of clouds.

So it was on June 28, 1914 in Sarajevo, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand came to visit. So also on September 11, 2001 in Manhattan, as millions of New Yorkers made their way to work. Those of us who remember what occurred just ten years ago should know that all of it happened once before: an act of political terror committed by a small band of conspirators plunged the world into a conflict that would take on a life and logic of its own—claiming countless lives, causing undreamt-of destruction, consuming vast resources, making mincemeat of ancient liberties, reviving bloodthirsty fanaticisms that enlightened people had thought long-dead, toppling governments, causing ethnic cleansing that displaced millions of civilians, and plunging the wealthiest part of the world into economic stagnation and crippling debt. The fact that history grimly repeats itself should only surprise those who do not believe in original sin—which means that it surprises almost everybody.

What can we learn from reading these two great signposts of disillusion? Perhaps there is no useful lesson we may draw beyond a bitter irony, a grim smile of agreement with Rudyard Kipling:

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

But that is too easy, isn’t it?

It might do, for those who plan to have no children, to leave behind no hostages to fortune. For anyone else, what is needed is more than cynicism, or stoic acceptance of what Freud called the “thanatos principle,” man’s inborn compulsion to build, tear down, then re-build the Tower of Babel. We want more than insight. What we crave, more than bread, is hope.

Hope is radically different from optimism. Stock analysts and campaign managers are optimistic—even when caution is called for. Optimism is the fragile dream that pervaded the West in 1914 and 2001. It was shattered by just one attack. Hope can survive in cancer wards and even concentration camps—as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Victor Frankl have testified. Hope exists, if you will, in a fourth dimension that cuts across the world we can see at an angle we cannot imagine. It rises from secret places in the heart where the torturers cannot find it, and spreads through quiet gestures or silent prayers they cannot quash. Hope is what Winston Smith hungered for in 1984, but all he knew how to look for was optimism—a plausible prospect for social change. And so he cursed God and died.

If we in our darkening times would not learn to love Big Brother, we need a higher, indestructible Love. To find it, we must claw our way through the detritus that blocks our path. Much of the rubbish consists of the empty boxes that held our optimism, the wrapping paper from the gifts we gave ourselves. We must realize, deep in the bone, that there is no salvation in a cargo cult, that we can place no faith in princes, or in whispered, promised knowledge that will help us be “as gods.”

The centuries-long effort to place man at creation’s apex, which our ancestors hailed as “humanism,” ended by goading men to sterilize, butcher and bomb their brothers. The adventure of secular science led by a straight, steady path from Galileo’s ebullient, “Eppur si muove!” to Robert Oppenheimer’s epiphany: “I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Without renouncing the wondrous powers to improve man’s life that come with scientific discipline, we urgently need to rediscover what too many humanists and scientists impatiently set aside. We must rummage through their libraries and labs to find the questions they suppressed, the data they fudged. We have spent five centuries asking only “How?” We must step back and ask again, “Why?” The answer will help us resist many temptations, of the sort our race falls into so very easily—to use the superhuman powers we gain in inhuman ways, to treat the weak, the “other,” the Enemy, as subhumans, as flies we can kill for sport. (King Lear)

To restrain ourselves and each other, to prepare a liveable future, there are certain fundamental axioms we need to accept as the bedrock of human rights and lasting peace. We do not need an infallible authority to reveal them; any honest student of twentieth century history could piece them together by looking at which perennial truths totalitarian movements systematically sought to deny:

I) The unique and absolute value of every human person, at each stage of life, who must be treated not as a means but an end in him or herself.

II) The transcendent moral order against which every law, custom, or policy must be judged, regardless of culture or government.

III) The duty of governments to serve the governed and defend—not replace or control—the free institutions of civil society.

IV) The priority of certain core humane values over economic or political expediency.

In the next several articles in this series, I will unfold the implications of each of these “inconvenient truths”—so styled because they stand in the way of every “pure” ideology that has emerged in the course of modernity, each partial truth about man that claims his absolute loyalty. They are speed bumps, if you will, on the road to any bruited utopia.

By slowing or even stopping us short of choosing “easy” shortcuts that render us less human, these “gods of the copybook headings” may well be thought of as commandments—or if you prefer, the wisdom of history, for which our parents and grandparents paid such a very high price in past hundred bloody years.

The day started with a brilliant blue sky, almost like the sky of that Tuesday ten years ago. The flags on the Brooklyn Bridge were at half-mast in the early morning.

The streets were quiet–a weekend morning, calmer still because of police roadblocks in lower Manhattan. A few officers, seeing my Navy ballcap (a gift from my wife, who’s in the reserves) called out, “Hooyah, Navy!”

Near the Ground Zero site itself, a crowd gathered around a security cordon as police let family members through to the official ceremony. Some handed out American flags.

A woman collapsed in tears. A small clutch of “9/11 Truthers” shouted anti-Bush slogans. Almost everyone ignored them, though a few people shouted back.

Heading back uptown, I listened to the memorial ceremony on the radio. Despite the absence of clergy, President Obama chose a religious text: Psalm 46, likely for its anti-war message:

He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth. He breaks the bow and shatters the spear; he burns the shields[d] with fire. (46:9)

No one seemed to applaud. Former President George W. Bush, who spoke later in the ceremony, was greeted with a warm ovation. He read Abraham Lincoln’s famous letter to Mrs. Bixby, who lost five sons in the Civil War.

I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

Throughout the rest of the city, there were smaller memorials. In Central Park, I passed a private ceremony for the families of employees of Cantor Fizgerald, the firm virtually wiped out by the 9/11 attacks. Back in the East Village, at the end of my run, I happened to run into the memorial gathering for the men of Ladder 3, the fire station that lost the most firefighters on 9/11.

The mood was somber but somehow festive, as families greeted each other with smiles and hugs. It had the feeling of a family reunion. The people gathered there will always be united by their loss and by the heroism of their loved ones. Some wore t-shirts bearing the slogan: “Still Heading Up.”

I learned today that Mayor Michael Bloomberg has asked that Americans begin referring to Ground Zero by its past and future name, World Trade Center. Today, with Freedom Tower rising over the new memorial, New York seems ready to celebrate new life while honoring the sacrifices that will never be forgotten.

The sun has given way to clouds that hang over the city, but the feeling on the streets is almost like that of an ordinary Sunday in the city–tourists walking around with maps, people meeting friends at coffee shops, or gathering at bars to watch the first weekend of pro football.

“Still Heading Up.” There’s something about that. It stays with you.

Ten years on, my emotions have evolved, however. Because for ten years I’ve watched the Left, much of Hollywood and almost all of the news media turn against our country for mercenary, partisan political reasons. And none of this surprised me. In the aftermath of the atrocity as solemn celebrities hosted benefit concerts and Democrats sang “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps, I knew it wouldn’t last and that over time they would become America’s enemy within in the fight to protect herself. I never even took a moment to hope I was wrong. Why waste the energy.

If you recall, we had seen it all before. We saw it when after spending years undermining a war of liberation with the Killing Fields of Cambodia as a direct result, the Left never once stopped to second guess themselves.

With great pride I watched my cousin Kyle join the military when the war was at its ugliest and just last week my grandson Mikey left boot camp and started his hazmat training with National Guard. With horror I’ve watched the Left use every dishonest trick and tool at their disposal to make their jobs harder.

September 11 didn’t strip me of my innocence, it confirmed my darkest cynicism. There is evil in the world and it is everywhere. Mikey and Kyle and so many of our finest sons and daughters have and will fight this evil on the battlefield with metal and gunpowder and courage. Those of us who don’t have the honor of wearing the uniform must fight it here at home with words and truth and, yes, courage.

Don’t get me wrong, I have faith — faith in America, and more importantly, in Americans. But I also know that our enemy within is okay with the Killing Fields of Cambodia as a result of their means to an end.

“Never forget” isn’t just about remembering the horrific sight of planes crashing into the Twin Towers.

9/11…We all remember what it is and what happened, and we vowed to never forget it. But the true meaning of NEVER FORGET is not to forget what 9/11 means, to our nation and to free people around the world and to never forget our mission. I have never actually tried to put together “what it means” in its totality and scope because the far reaching impact it had on my life and where I was in my life at the time.  I liken it to being asked “What was BUDS like?” or “What’s it like to be a Navy SEAL?”

These questions are just unanswerable in a sitting.  They will usually elicit a response of “Really?” or “You will have to come up with some better questions than that.”  My quick and ready answer is the first line of a Dickens book “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”  Then I just walk away.

9/11…It ripped me to the core — being that I grew up not forty miles away in — Upstate New Jersey and had some people that I knew in there as most of us in the area did.  Plus, growing up in New Jersey, you were used to seeing New York City on the horizon when we would climb to the top of the Mountain behind my house.  I used to visit my grandparents and cousins that lived out on Remsen and we would see the towers as we would go by on the GWB past Yankee Stadium.  We would sometimes go into the city and go to the towers to ride in the elevators and jump when it got to the top and you would almost slam into the ceiling or to feel almost weightless as you would plummet so fast.  Those buildings were HUGE!!! You may have seen them on TV but until you have seen them up close and personal you don’t get the full scope of what happened there.

About 4 days before 9/11, in 2001, I was a young Navy SEAL and had just graduated from SQT, which is the last hurdle to get through before reporting to your assigned Team or Platoon.  I was happy and excited to be a Frogman and there wasn’t a care in the world for me. Like firemen, you don’t wish for people to get into accidents or for their houses to get burnt down but you want to get out there and play in the big game being that you are finally in the Big Leagues.  I wanted to test my skills somewhere in the world and there really wasn’t much going on in the world.  I wanted something to happen in the world so the SEALs can go save somebody or kill some bad guys….. I remember thinking that my generation had nothing to show other than for the advent of the computer and video games, and this was about two before 9/11.  Little did I know the Horror that awaited a nation……. MY NATION!

Such is the case with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Not since Japan’s World War II attack on Pearl Harbor has the United States had its territorial sovereignty violated by such aggression. Everyone who was alive on 9/11/01 recalls today what they were doing, and how they reacted, felt, grieved, mourned, and prayed. For most Americans, that grief, sadness and prayer will never end.

Faith becomes more important to people when they are faced with the loss of loved ones. Religious ceremonies typically accompany the burial process, and the same holds true for memorial events like the upcoming September 11, 2011 ten-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks. Except that in the case of the ceremony to be held at the site of the World Trade Center– Ground Zero – Mayor Michael Bloomberg has put the kibosh on having religion be a part of it.

It is a decision that seems to defy all logic and commonsense, and it comes off as cruel, heartless, and suggests Hizzoner is out of touch with the people who elected him to be Mayor (not King) of New York City. It falls on the heels of another take-your-breath-away decision about the same event. In mid-August, Mayor Bloomberg nixed inviting first responders to the 10-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the WTC.

Faith and first responders defined the attacks and their aftermath. Let’s remember – although the mainstream media tries its best to make us forget – that the attacks themselves were motivated by a perverted sense of faith, by radical Islamists hell-bent on a twisted brand of Jihad against the west. First responders pulled people from the wreckage of this religion-inspired assault, many losing their lives in the process. It is faith that has sustained Americans as they have tried to make sense of the devastation and loss ever since.

Mayor Rudy Giuliani made religion a part of the healing process shortly after 9/11 during an interfaith ceremony at Yankee Stadium. Let’s not forget how President George W. Bush injected faith into everything he did as President, recognizing its importance in a nation grounded in Judeo-Christian roots. So why exclude first responders and faith, Mr. Mayor?

I don’t think Mayor Bloomberg has excluded faith from the 9/11 memorial this year because he is anti-religion. Quite the contrary. In May 2010, he came out in full-force defense of the proposal to build a mosque near Ground Zero. He’s even on record for saying the government, “shouldn’t be in the business of picking” one religion over another. So why the hostility toward religion at a time when most Americans (indeed New Yorkers) demand it?

There’s a paradox about liberalism that I have observed for many years – if not a downright psychopathology. At the risk of possibly offending a few in the minority, liberals intentionally offend the majority. Mayor Bloomberg is likely guided by this distorted sense of reasoning. He’d rather guarantee that he insults a majority of Christian, Jewish, and people of other faiths in order to avoid even the potential of offending a minority of Muslims. We saw it with his decision to support the Ground Zero Mosque, and we’re seeing it with the decision to remove religion from the 9/11 anniversary memorial. But how to explain the prohibition on first responders? I can only think of the famous punch line comedian Ron White uses often: “You can’t fix stupid!” But you can vote it out of office.

Follow Mike Angley on Twitter: @MikeAngley and on FaceBook: mike.angley.