NYT, 9/11: "Blood of other people's children, next generation's money"

[DeepModem Mom]

Editorial
9/11/06
Published: September 11, 2006

....It was a time when the nation was waiting to find out what it was supposed to do, to be called to the task that would give special lasting meaning to the tragedy that it had endured.

But the call never came. Without ever having asked to be exempt from the demands of this new post-9/11 war, we were cut out. Everything would be paid for with the blood of other people’s children, and with money earned by the next generation. Our role appeared to be confined to waiting in longer lines at the airport. President Bush, searching the other day for an example of post-9/11 sacrifice, pointed out that everybody pays taxes.

That pinched view of our responsibility as citizens got us tax cuts we didn’t need and an invasion that never would have occurred if every voter’s sons and daughters were eligible for the draft. With no call to work together on some effort greater than ourselves, we were free to relapse into a self- centeredness that became a second national tragedy. We have spent the last few years fighting each other with more avidity than we fight the enemy.

When we measure the possibilities created by 9/11 against what we have actually accomplished, it is clear that we have found one way after another to compound the tragedy. Homeland security is half-finished, the development at ground zero barely begun. The war against terror we meant to fight in Afghanistan is at best stuck in neutral, with the Taliban resurgent and the best economic news involving a bumper crop of opium. Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11 when it was invaded, is now a breeding ground for a new generation of terrorists.

Listing the sins of the Bush administration may help to clarify how we got here, but it will not get us out. The country still hungers for something better, for evidence that our leaders also believe in ideas larger than their own political advancement....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/opinion/11mon1.html?hp

[Kagemusha]

1. Sounds like the last paragraph quoted above is pointed at Dems.

Asking not just for Democrats to believe in bigger ideas than their own political victories, but to provide evidence thereof that others can have confidence in. (You know, like where the nails went into the wrists. That sort of thing.)

[kenny blankenship]

2. "lapse into self-centeredness"

Wow. I wish I could say "ONLY the NYTimes, ensconced as it is in the capital of self-centeredness, could be SO oblivious to the self-centeredness that practically defines what it means to be American" but of course they're hardly the only ones who're that blind. Any paper's editorial page in our fair land could sport a blooper like that "lapse into self-centeredness", as if we'd been anything else...
Self-centeredness is our national religion, and our political faith. We are unique in our absolute atomization among societies, to the point where it is an absurdity to speak of an American "society". Margaret Thatcher once shocked Britain by saying "There is no such thing as society"--she was then proposing a radical individualism for Britain, but we had already realized that "ideal" in America.
America in my lifetime at least has never been about anything else than spending money borrowed from other generations and other countries, and its political donating classes have never (in my lifetime) been willing to shed any blood but the blood of other people's children. But they're willing to shed that blood in ANY AMOUNT NECESSARY to secure their soft lives and easy money.

[enough]

3. k&r

[DeepModem Mom]

4. a.m. kick