printEvery year since September 11, 2001, New Yorker Chris Matthew Sciabarra (who was gracious enough to endorse my book) has written a tribute to the World Trade Center. In 2003 he penned this:
“We all knew that these buildings had come to symbolize so much of what made New York great. That’s one of the reasons they were targeted. It’s the kind of thing that led the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand to write in The Fountainhead, fifty years earlier, that New York’s skyline was ‘the will of man made visible. She wrote'”:
Is it beauty and genius people want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see this city from my window—no, I don’t feel how small I am—but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.
Read Chris’ poignant yearly tributes here.
For those who believe the US government planned 9-11 (such as I) the assault on the WTC should be attributed to the government; it shouldn’t be attributed to envy towards America and what the WTC stood for (though such envy does exist and though such envy is a threat).
Few people grumble about and distrust the federal government more than I do, as evidenced in my many fevered rants on this site and others. However, to lay the blame for the WTC disaster at the foot of our government is lunacy. Certainly, the foreign policy incompetence and lack of courage and forsight that prevailed in both Clinton and Bush administrations greatly facilitated the Jihadists ability to pull off this coup of international terrorism, but I don’t think that even our government would stoop to the level of mass murder of American citizens to achieve a political end.
What we have, in my opinion, is a world wide and long lasting war instigated by the muslims and fueled by our own incompetence, cowardice and myopic refusal to face the obvious facts that they want to kill all of us. All this talk of government duplicity is foolish and counter-productive as it diverts attention from the real enemy.
When I was a teacher in Saudi Arabia in 1998-99, students would occasionally ask me if I had ever heard of Osama bin Ladin. I had of course, but denied it. “Who’s he, a pop star?” They assured me that I would hear of him.
After we watched the towers fall on CNN, I was flabbergasted to read discussions as to whether we should “go to war”. How could anybody fail to realize that we are at war, whether we want to be or not? As if it were within our control.
With my fellow-libertarians I share the view that government is not a magic wand, as the social engineers would have us believe, but a club. And a club is useless for addressing all personal and social problems save one – it’s good for hitting people who mean you harm.