Happy New Year!
Is it? Will it be? What kind of year is in store? Are we approaching it with rose-colored glasses? Do we see the world as it is – or the world as we want it to be? What's the difference?
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Are we too fat and happy to realize that the world we live in is not related to Hollywood or to Disney or to fairytales with happy endings? Are we grown up enough to realize we can't have everything we want and that how we deal with what we get is a measure of our maturity?
Do we even care?
2006. Where did that come from? It seems just moments ago that it was the millennium and most of us felt it was such a momentous transition that life beyond would be different from anything we'd ever experienced.
It seemed everyone had an opinion as to how this new era would mean we'd changed. It was different, after all. Mankind would be at another level of awareness. We'd be better for it and the effect would be a movement toward peace and conciliation and a better kind of humanity, culture and civilization.
We were wrong. Very wrong. We still believed fairytales.
One fateful day changed everything. Sept. 11, 2001 ... 9-11.
It's the date that effectively shoved us back from the utopia we were told was in store and into the reality that nothing had really changed – nothing, except the date on the calendar.
Beyond that, we were still embroiled in politics, religion, economics, money, violence, greed, selfishness, pride, avarice, jealousy and – power. Everyone had a stake in the pot of power. How it's gotten and how it's used determines how the rest of us suffer or thrive.
Sept. 11 showed us, if we took the time to notice, that nothing had changed in the new millennium. We may have thought it was a new era – perhaps one of greater enlightenment, perhaps one in which people would behave differently and ultimately, mankind and civilization would be better.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
What we were and are confronted with is a struggle with – and battle between – a 20th-21st century mentality and the 6th-century simplicity of "I'm right, you're wrong ... change or die." That just doesn't play in our politically correct, multicultural mentality.
We'd been told that if you treated people the way you wanted to be treated, they'd respond in kind. If you accept differences, those differences would go away. If you excuse beliefs and behaviors that contradict accepted tenets of Western Civilization, everything would be OK because "those people" are just like us and we can all be one happy family.
Wrong again. We're victims of morally relative, multiculturalism and it's a killer. Literally.
More than 3,000 innocents died on 9-11 – people whose only mistake was to get up that day and continue their daily routine. They had no idea that on that day they were actually soldiers in what some call the "Third World War" and others say is a war on terrorism.
Whichever it is, those unaware warriors were cut down without warning. While many realized instantly the implication of their deaths, others regarded them as aberrations – quickly noted and then forgotten. In the haze of relativism, the deaths of those people were diminished by invisibility in the media and the passage of time.
Now, nearly five years later, those dead are all but forgotten – not by their grieving families, but by our society as a whole. We didn't see them then and we don't want to be reminded of them now.
Plans for a 9-11 memorial are mired in politics, ego and attempts to be multiculturally inclusive. The dead are lost in the bickering.
The media facilitate that by controlling and restricting the images of that day and of the deaths. We don't see the planes hit the towers nor do we see the towers burning and collapsing. We don't see the bodies falling and we certainly don't hear them hitting the ground.
Interesting, isn't it, that we're a society drowning in images of violence, pornography, explicit sex and war. When any of that is restricted, we scream about freedom of speech and expression.
Yet we allow censorship by the free media of the images of what terrorism has done to us and what it has in store for us if it wins the battle for the soul of our civilization and culture.
Our political correctness renders us unable to face the reality that there are those who would destroy us for what we are, what we believe and what we have. They'll resort to the barbarism of another time and culture.
We cannot or will not accept this reality and persist in trying to fit their crudeness and cruelty into the rules of our civilization.
We ignore that this won't work. Our refusal to face this reality will be the death of us – literally.
When we can watch on our media the videos of innocent Americans held prisoner and being decapitated simply because they are Americans and at the same time refuse to see the videos of innocent Americans jumping from the towers on 9-11 to avoid being burned to death in those concrete and steel infernos, you have to wonder who are the barbarians.
What you do know is who are the fools.
We are.
When our media show the images of burned bodies of innocents being hung from a bridge accompanied by cheering and dancing – carnage carried out simply to shove such barbarity in our collective faces – and we don't respond with national outrage – it's clear something is wrong ... with us.
We cling to a utopian image of how to behave and ignore the rats chewing on our toes – and they won't stop there. The only way to end it is to kill the rats.
We don't have the courage. Yes, we went into Afghanistan and, yes, we went into Iraq and, yes, Americans supported President Bush when he spoke of seeking out and destroying evil.
But then, too many of us chickened out, led by liberals on both sides of the congressional aisle. In their naivete, they believe they'd be safe if the enemy ultimately wins. They refuse to see that if we lose this war, they'll be first on the list for retaliation.
Happy New Year – maybe.