Six Years

I feel the need to memorialize September 11, 2001. It was the Pearl Harbor of my generation.

Last year I wrote of our failure to address the real cause of 9/11 -- the Islamic atittude that it is acceptable to murder non-believers in the name of spreading the faith. Not much has changed on that front. In some ways, we're worse off. For example, November 2006 saw the Democrats take power in the House and Senate, based largely on an anti-war platform. While Bush et al. haven't fully taken the war to the enemy, the Democrats want to fall back on diplomacy, a tactic which time and again has been seen as a sign of weakness by the Islamics.

The biggest American political issue in the past year was illegal immigration. Unfortunately, the flow of illegals across the US-Mexican border is not limited to people looking for better economic prospects. Thousands of "Other Than Mexicans" or "OTMs" also sneak across. And many of them are from the Middle East, sneaking into the country with no doubt nefarious purposes. (Lest anyone accuse me of xenophobia, I am in favor of legal immigration of people who will make a positive contribution to America. But illegal immigrants are by definition, criminals. While many of them are seeking better lives through work, many are here to take advantage of the American welfare state. Witness the collapsing hospital systems in California.)

Meanwhile, the US government continues to treat its own citizens as more serious potential threats. E.g., in the form of the degrading harassment by TSA agents at airports. Jerry Pournelle calls this "anarcho-tyranny." It's as good a term as any, I suppose.

Before you know it we'll be memorializing the tenth anniversary of 9/11/01. I expect that not much will have changed, unless some Islamics carry off another successful attack on American soil. In that case, things will get worse.