"They thought they could break us. They thought they could scare us. We're the land of the free and home of the brave. And we will stand."

Today, of course, is 9-11, the day Obama's pastor said "America's chickens came home to roost."

Photo from Instapundit, who also recommends this piece by James Lilek, written on 9-11-2003: http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/03/0903/091103.html

Instapundit also refers us to this passage from James Harris's Civilization and It's Enemies: 

Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.
…
They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.
They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn’t done enough for — yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part — something that we could correct. And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.
The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason — it is his reason, and not ours.

Flag photo found here: http://accordingtohoyt.com/2012/09/11/eleven-years/

Where, In her piece, Sarah Hoyt writes:
"On the one hand, part of me wants to laugh at the terrorists.  They thought they could break us.  They thought they could scare us.  They underestimated both the size of our territory and the mettle of my people.

And part of me thinks of the psychological twisting that has taken place since then: people who blame their own country for the actions of barbarians; people who kowtow to the barbarians and claim to be multiculturalists because that sounds so much better than vile cowards; people who think that a country the size of ours, as wealthy as we are should do nothing to deter attackers because we’d be protected by our halo of purity and goodness.

I think of our troops who fought the enemy there, so we wouldn’t fight them here.  I think of the brave young men and women willing to lay down their lives for this country — for the last, best hope on Earth. And I think of those who died, even on 9/11, to save others: the people who went into the towers, to help total strangers down.

And as an author to an Author I have to admire the plotting touch, where the three burly and brave guys who spearheaded the fight back in flight 93 were a born again man, a Jewish man, and a gay man.  Can you imagine any group designed to give more heart burn to the enemies that brought down the towers and who tried to use flight 93 as a weapon?

I can’t either.  But, more importantly, I can’t imagine any other culture, any other country, any other place where those three would have banded together, immediately – instinctively – putting aside any perceived differences, thinking only of trying to save the defenseless, laying down their lives for others.

Their lives were forfeit, but they died free men.  They died heroes.  More importantly, they died Americans.

Surely a nation that produces such men will not perish from this Earth.

We will not go quietly into that good night.

We’re the land of the free and the home of the brave.  And we will stand."

Read the whole thing here:  http://accordingtohoyt.com/2012/09/11/eleven-years/