For many Americans, the world changed the moment on September 11, 2001, Todd Beamer told his fellow passengers on Flight 93, “Let’s roll.” One of the men who joined him was Jeremy Glick, whom I knew a little growing up. He was five years older but still part of a local wrestling program and, separately, a judo dojo in which I was enrolled.
I was very young and may be misremembering, but I think Jeremy played a role in the clearest lesson that stuck with me from wrestling. The coaches started a smaller wrestler underneath the heaviest kid in the group, and the lesson was that, by force of will, anybody could break free from a captor, so to speak.
What changed with “let’s roll” was that the hostages took action. Before that moment, the expert wisdom was to sit tight and wait to be ransomed. Thanks to the still-new technology of mobile phones, however, the men on Flight 93 realized the rules had changed, and they were bound for death. That made fighting back the best option, at least to foil the plan for the sake of others, even if survival was impossible.
Settling a question that arose while my son and I discussed 9/11 last night, I learned that 15 people above where the planes hit actually survived. One of the six stairways that went to the top of the buildings had been sufficiently protected by the elevator machinery to remain passable.
However many people were there above the plane-driven hole in the South Tower, which was the second tower hit, but the first to collapse, only 15 took the stairs down. More could have done so, but who would have thought the buildings would fall? The expert wisdom was to sit tight and wait for the professionals to put out the fire and contrive a safe escape.
Brian Clark was one of those 15 and gives a fascinating view into what it was like above the impact. (Note that the text is jumbled up, so following the narrative requires skipping sections.) Clark chanced to pick the passable stairway, but as he began the descent, some people were heading in the other direction, saying they had to go up because there was too much smoke and flame below.
That made sense under the old paradigm. If survival is just a matter of waiting, get away from the danger zone. (And maybe there’d be helicopters on the roof. I remember wondering where they were.)
Yet, those who went down lived. Only 15.
As the twentieth anniversary of that day has neared, news arrived that more people have died from the toxic atmosphere that lingered around Ground Zero for weeks than died on the day. The federal Environmental Protection Agency had assured people that the air was safe to breathe, but people who lived and worked there sensed something wrong with that “smell of death,” which would produce spontaneous nosebleeds.
When the North Tower collapses about 20 minutes into a video taken by a nearby resident, somebody closes the apartment window and a woman watching the cloud come their way asks, “Is it dangerous?”
Yes. Of course it was dangerous. It was a big cloud of pulverized construction materials and electronics. But who thinks of those things? These days, a cloud like that fills me with dread because of the years I spent considering what was in the air around me as I demolished and rebuilt old houses in Newport, but on that day, I expect I’d have thought of the smoke essentially as an irritant. If officials announced that the air was safe to breathe, I’d have assumed they’d done extensive testing and measured it against some established standard.
The world doesn’t always work like that. Caveats and disclaimers get lost as the wisdom spreads. Personal incentives and decisions about tradeoffs play some considerations down while playing others up.
We have to remember, of course, that inherited wisdom is often correct, and in a complex reality with countless inputs and stimuli constantly attacking our senses and our thoughts, we have no choice but to consider some things as settled… simply because.
But there is a risk of complacency. Something you think you know — something the experts insist is true — might not be correct or might not apply to a new situation. We always have the obligation to think for ourselves and then to roll with our conclusions.
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Thursday, issue one of the most direct rhetorical assaults on tens of millions of Americans that most of us have ever heard from the White House. Friday, call for unity and respect… on the same day news comes out that he accidentally drone-killed an ally and his young children during a performative counterattack against ISIS.
Anybody buying it? You couldn’t write a fictional character this bad, because nobody would believe it.
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The day after Joe Biden talked about “tens of millions of American citizens like they’re vermin” (as J.D. Vance put it), his Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, took to MSNBC to issue a dire warning:
“The threat over the last 20 years has evolved,” Mayorkas said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “We were, of course, in the aftermath of 9/11 focused on the foreign terrorist, the individual who sought to penetrate our defenses, enter the United States, and do us harm.”
But that threat changed, and now the most prominent threat is that of the “homegrown violent extremist, the individual who was already here on American soil,” said the secretary.
This has become go-to rhetoric for progressives and Democrats (to the extent those are different groups anymore). They always want your eyes turned toward their political opposition as a threat.
A FEMA student handout from the early 2000s, for example, provides more detail for domestic terrorism than international, and lists only right-wing domestic terrorists, although contemporaneous reports tend to illustrate that left-wing terrorists were more active, particularly to the extent of being organized. (Naturally, bureaucratic summary reports disguised the half-century-or-more dominance of left-wing terrorism on the domestic front by redefining them as “special interest” terrorists after a brief surge of right-wing attacks. Of course, left-wing terrorism has now been redefined as “protest.”
Those who are not much younger than me will remember that before it was found to be two Black men terrorizing the D.C. area with sniper attacks, the media and the Left worked overtime to imply it must be white supremacists. By this point, this was already the standard talking point.
So, when the Democrat who currently occupies the White House says things like “we cannot allow these actions [allowing non-vaccination] to stand in the way of protecting the large majority of Americans,” it’s difficult not to feel he’ll target you for something or other when the politics allow.
Featured image by Kal Visuals on Unsplash.
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Yesterday, Patrick Anderson of the Providence Journal tweeted the picture used as the featured image in this post. As Anderson notes, the masking is entirely according to partisan lines. Unmasked (left to right) are Senators Jessica de la Cruz and Gordon Rogers and Representatives David Place and Brian Newberry.
The follow-up comments are interesting, too. Far-left Senator Bridget Valverde asks, “Aren’t masks required again in state buildings as of a few weeks ago?” Note the hall-monitor attitude that rules are rules and must be followed.
To this, Anderson’s colleague at the Projo tweets:
My guess: the Republicans defying the public buildings mask requirement would say they do not recognize gov’s authority to issue any more covid emergency orders.
Here, note the emphasis on “defying,” from the woman who recently said vaccine freedom protesters who were requesting to enter the building were “storming” it.
In and out of the mainstream media, Democrats all the way on up to the top are insisting that Americans comply with contradictory propositions. On the one hand, everybody should get vaccinated because that makes your slim chance of being harmed by COVID even more slim. On the other hand, everybody should wear masks because people who have voluntarily chosen not to get vaccinated (and who have not already had COVID) might get sick.
If Democrats want Americans to get vaccinated, the best thing they could do is display the normal life for which we all pine. When they go about in their masks despite Rhode Island’s having one of the best vaccination rates in the country, they reinforce the reasons that nobody (at least nobody who isn’t yet vaccinated) trusts them. They make it seem all about compliance, which will always find a justification.
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“I suggest that all women refuse to have sex with men until they are guaranteed the right to choose by Congress,” Midler said on Twitter while responding to the Supreme Court’s 5-4 vote to deny an emergency request to block the Texas law, deemed by critics as the most restrictive abortion legislation in the country.
First, if pro-abortion women stop having sex, then the problem of abortion is largely solved. See, in almost all cases, women can choose not to do that which produces children if they aren’t willing to give birth to them when they’re conceived.
But second, note the logical consequence of Midler’s position. Withholding sex for abortion policy implies that sex — and, therefore, abortion — is primarily for the benefit of men.
Fight the patriarchy!
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That’s my summary of the last line of Kevin Williamson’s reflections on Rolling Stone’s fake story about Oklahoma emergency rooms filling up with ivermectin overdoses:
A note to our progressive friends: This is your version of Q-Anon — falling for obvious, ridiculous lies because you want to believe the worst about people you hate.
The biggest difference is that most conservatives no little-to-nothing about Q-Anon and/or treat it as an inside joke. Williamson is describing the mainstream media.
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Can you really believe them?
According to Daniel Teng of The Epoch Times, the government of New South Wales, Australia, is promising to begin returning “freedoms” to vaccinated people —and only vaccinated people — when they number 70% of the population. At 80%, “more freedoms would be available.”
But what happens when the nation hits 70% but something spooks public health authorities? They’ll move the goal posts.
Once officials think freedoms are theirs to restrict and permit, the people lose any right to them and have little leverage.
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… which is to say they believe that unborn babies are human beings with a right to life until such time as their opinion on the matter can make a difference. Note how the RI Congressman explains himself:
“Although I remain personally opposed to abortion, as a matter of public policy, my position has evolved,” Langevin wrote in an op-ed published in Thursday’s Providence Journal. …
“In light of this inaction by the Court — and as the conservative majority seems increasingly likely to take the extraordinary step of overturning Roe v. Wade — I have reconsidered my position on reproductive rights,” Langevin wrote.
So, as long as the Supreme Court was making his beliefs irrelevant, he maintained them. As soon as his beliefs might affect his own actions, he “evolved” them. This compounds support for the evil of abortion with deceit.
Bishop Tobin’s response in the above link is right on. As he sells his soul, Langevin should remember that progressives will always go for more-true believers.
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There are so many angles to debate with Joe Biden’s play to force every American company with 100 or more employees to mandate vaccines among its employees, but for the moment, think about how crazy it is economically. The United States is in the position of having more jobs than people are willing to fill, at the moment, and here goes the occupant of the White House commanding the employers of more than half of the payroll of the workforce to pressure or lock out 46% of the population. He’s announced this, by the way, the same month inflation at the wholesale record reaches its highest recorded year-over-year level.
The move may not be entirely a function of ideological stupidity. As with every policy, some people do benefit. Some portion of the motivation is likely, therefore, to be cynical. Note a contrast in this Reuters story; on one hand:
Big names in Corporate America including Amazon.com Inc cheered U.S. President Joe Biden as he mandated employees either get vaccinated or be tested regularly, but some mid-sized companies worried that the plan would be tough to carry out and unpopular with a slice of their workers.
But on the other hand:
… some mid-sized companies worried about losing employees at a time when they are trying to grow business.
Stephen Bullock, chief executive of Power Curbers Companies in Salisbury, North Carolina, said he was still reeling from the implications.
“We have encouraged, cajoled, and educated our staff,” he said, but only 40 percent of his workforce have received the shot. “We have a segment of our workforce that will not get the vaccine under any circumstance.”
This Big Government move, in other words, is a gift to oligarchs at the expense of their competition.
But the divisiveness is worse than that. The Biden administration obviously believes unvaccinated Americans are more likely to be supporters of its political opposition, and it is working to make them unemployable. Biden is creating two classes in such a way as to make one suffer.
I’ve been mystified at the refusal of vaccine-pushing government officials to make allowances for natural immunity, and this observation may provide a partial explanation. Most people who catch COVID-19 have a relatively easy time of it, and almost all recover. If natural immunity is counted alongside vaccination, then the employees in Stephen Bullock’s company who “will not get the vaccine under any circumstances” would only be locked out until they could show they had antibodies (which many probably already do).
Only by commanding that they follow a government mandate can Biden and his allies ensure that their social exclusion will be permanent.
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According to John Podhoretz, Biden’s vax-mandate “speech was a Rube Goldberg message aimed at neurotic vaccinated people”. Pohhoretz continues:
[Open full post]He told the American people without qualification that fully vaccinated people are at incredibly low risk: “Only 1 out of every 160,000 fully vaccinated Americans was hospitalized for COVID per day.”
Then he promised to shield them against the evil people who are threatening their very lives: “We’re going to protect the vaccinated from unvaccinated co-workers.”
But Joe, you just said the vaccinated were already protected!