Time to Wake Up. Time to Remember.

I have posted something about September 11^th, 2001 each year since I opened my Facebook account in 2008. Now that I have a blog, I should probably do the same thing.

I opened my account today and saw this video where college students are approached and asked why we were attacked that Tuesday morning in 2001. A few of them attempt to give reasons, one says it was in response to President Bush taking us to war in the Middle East, and only one says she heard it had something to do with religion, but thinks that was a cover up.

The average student starting college this year was just four years old when the attacks on September 11^th happened. It is sad to me that so many college freshman have not been properly educated on the attacks that happened during their lifetime.

Unfortunately, I’m not surprised.

I worked as a Navy recruiter for three years. During that time, I had to visit local high schools and colleges to develop prospects for enlistment. We did a variety of things to generate interest from classroom presentations to coordinating visits from the SEALs, Navy Band, and Blue Angels simulators.

When I started recruiting, as an ice breaker, some of the guys and I would bring Navy merchandise like t-shirts, coffee mugs, keychain lanyards, and other stuff to give to the students. Anyone who wanted the stuff would have to do push-ups or crunches. About a year in, a new recruiter showed up and said, “We want them mostly for their brains, so let’s do trivia instead.”

That sounded like a good idea. So my fellow recruiter and I went to the high school and the first question he asked was who the Vice President of the United States was. I wasn’t too politically aware in high school, but I knew who the Vice Presidents were. If you don't already know how old I am, George HW Bush was the Vice President when I started Highs School and Dan Quayle was when I graduated. I thought that question was too easy.

I was wrong. I don’t have the exact statistics, but more than 90% of the kids we asked could not identify who the Vice President of the United States was. Yes, I kept track at the time. Even more could not tell us anything about the three branches of government. Sadly, too many couldn’t even tell me there actually were three branches of government.

When you watch these man on the street (MOTS) interviews, you have to understand that they aren’t spending all day on campuses, filming hours of interviews and cherry-picking the idiots. Most MOTS interviewers spend an hour or so just trying to get people to participate. When people do participate, what you see on the videos are often the lightly edited results.

In this video, Dan Joseph interviews recent high school graduates, many of whom cannot identify the year that the United States declared independence from Great Britain. Notice the number of graduates wearing honors stoles and cords.

When I was in high school, we had a different name for people who couldn’t identify the date of American independence – kindergarteners. Those that somehow made it to high school without this information we referred to as unintelligent or slackers. They certainly wouldn’t be earning any honors.

In the same year as the attacks on 9/11, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation conducted a study of High School students. In the study, students were asked 4^th grade level history questions such as:

·         What year did the United States declare its independence? 86% responded correctly.

·         How many original colonies were there? 83% correct.

·         What country did the United States declare its independence from? 78% correct. Most of the incorrect students thought the answer was France and 5% thought it was Canada.

A similar survey of high school students was conducted 2008 and all of these percentages dropped to less than 50%!

It isn’t just history where kids are failing, it is basic civics too. In 2001, the numbers of kids who could pass a basic civics quiz was lower than the history results. You would think that graduates of colleges and universities would do better, but in 2010, the number of college graduates who could pass a basic history and civics quiz at the elementary school level was 65%!

Sure, that’s better than 50%, but that means that 35% of college graduates don’t know how the real world works! 65% is considered a failing grade in most college courses. So while I am glad 65% can pass, colleges and universities have no reason to celebrate.

Those who do not remember the past

George Santayana’s famous quote, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” is still true. Releasing voters into the real world who are vastly uneducated in how the government, economics, civics, and politics works is killing us. It has enabled vastly unqualified political candidates not only to run, but to win nominations and even the presidency. The past two decades have clearly demonstrated this.

In 2004, John Kerry won the Democrat nomination to oppose George W. Bush. During his entire candidacy, he never once proposed a substantive policy plan. When challenged on many of his plans he would say things like, “I have a plan and it’s a good plan,” and that was it. Sound familiar? That same line is being used today by Donald Trump who is the biggest joke to be played on the GOP. He only adds, "trust me."

An unqualified candidate was not only nominated but won the presidency in 2008. Not that the supposedly qualified alternative was any better. John McCain was a progressive and wanted to make the same kind of socialist changes to our economy as Barack Obama did. The only difference was scope and timing. Barack Obama on health care was basically throw the frog in the boiling water whereas John McCain wanted to do throw the frog in tepid water and slowly turn up the heat. McCain ultimately did himself in by selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate. I've never really been a Palin fan, but I have never been a Palin basher. Recently, it's been difficult not to because she has become the Tina Fey ("I can see Russia from my house") caricature of herself (“Speak American”).

Until we can educate our kids again and teach them how to educate themselves instead of getting voting advice from movie stars, reality TV, MTV, and Rolling Stone, the situation will continue to get worse.

Panem et Circenses

Juvenal wrote in c.100 A.D., “Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”

This also is just as true today. People don’t want real politicians who can make things happen. They want free stuff and entertainment. Don’t think so? Obama was swept in to office by promising free health care. Peggy Joseph famously thought that Obama was going to pay for her gas and mortgage. Bernie Sanders popularity is being driven by his promise of instituting Scandinavian style socialism where everyone gets free college. Even Donald Trump is pushing for free health care.

Much of Democratic support is driven by the fear that if Republicans win, all the entitlement programs providing free housing, food, and income (section 8, SNAP/food stamps, welfare/unemployment) will go away. Of course that’s absolute nonsense, but this narrative is driven by Hollywood, the media, and most of the Democrat party. Fiscal conservatives really don’t want to end those programs. What they want to do is end the rampant fraud. They want people who can work to work. There are too many people taking advantage of entitlement programs who are perfectly able to care for themselves who don’t.

People who want all this free stuff and support candidates who promise free stuff to them ignore or are ignorant of history and even current events. We don’t have to go back too far to see that ultimately these types of programs ultimately hurt countries and their economies.

Free college in Scandinavia isn’t working because college graduates are still graduating with thousands of dollars of debt. College is free, but living isn't.

Greece has been providing free stuff for years, but their economy couldn’t sustain it. Every time the Greek government proposes austerity measures, Greek citizens riot. Don’t take my free stuff away! You think Ferguson and Baltimore was bad over the past year? Athens makes those protesters look like rank amateurs.

As far as entertainment, politicians and political pundits are offering that too. Did you watch the Fox News Debate? Do you think next week's CNN debate will be any better? If 2012 was any indication, things are going to get even sillier until next summer.

Time to wake up

What does this have to do with September 11^th? Fourteen years and a day ago, we were all living in a blissful little bubble. Too many of us had become sheep. We forgot April 19^th, 1775. We forgot December 20^th, 1860 and April 12^th, 1861. We forgot December 7^th, 1941. We forgot February 26^th, 1993. We forgot April 19^th, 1995.

On September 10^th, 2001, most of us never dreamed that it could ever happen here. Bombings, hijackings, terrorism. That happens overseas, not here. In my lifetime, we only briefly woke up because of terrorist acts on American soil, but we rolled over and went right back to sleep.

I began to wake up in 1990 two weeks after I joined the Navy. I had been asleep for 18 years. When I joined the Navy, there was a sort of ethereal understanding that I could go to war. It was the military. But I thought, that doesn’t happen anymore. Richard Nixon had written No More Vietnams in 1987, the Cold War had ended, the Berlin Wall fell and Germany was reunified, and Russia seemed like it was becoming an ally. All was well in the world.

Then, on August 2^nd, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. They told us about it in Boot Camp. Suddenly, the reality of war hit me. But then I was assigned to shore duty. All my Boot Camp buddies got to go overseas and sent me cool stories about liberty in Asia and Europe. War was something that happened over there and when America gets involved, we kick butts. So, I dozed off a little.

At the end of Operation Desert Storm, I got to see what security on a military base was really like. It was crazy. On the Submarine base in San Diego where I was stationed, security was serious. They didn’t play there. But on every other base in the San Diego area, most of the time I could walk or drive on base without ever seeing a gate guard much less be challenged for ID.

It went on like this for the most part until 1998 after the US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Security was stepped up even more in 2000 after the USS Cole bombing. I have to say, it seemed like the military didn’t take security seriously. Even our military and government leaders were asleep.

For me, it wasn’t any of the terrorist attacks that woke me up. I woke up in 1995 when I read Tom Clancy’s 1994 novel Debt of Honor. The book ends with a Japanese terrorist flying a Boeing 747 filled with fuel flying into the US Capitol Building, killing the President of the United States, most of the Congress, the Supreme Court, and many other people in government.

As I read the book, I was sharing the story with my wife. At one point, she didn’t know I was talking about a book and thought I was talking about news going on in the real world. It was that plausible.

When I finished reading the book, I told my wife something to the effect of, “It’s just a matter of time before terrorists realize that it would be more effective to fly a plane into a building full of people than to simply blow up a plane.” If you know her you can ask her. I also spent the next six years telling the same thing to anyone who would listen. Of course, for the most part, I was ridiculed, called paranoid and even a conspiracy theorist.

After 9/11 I just felt like saying, “I told you so.”

Tom Clancy put two and two together. He looked at history and figured it out. Unfortunately, not enough people who mattered read his book or paid attention if they did.

Now, just fourteen years after one of the most devastating attacks on American soil, it seems we have been put back to sleep. The same culprits who put us to sleep for the sixty years prior to 9/11/01 are doing it again – the media, Hollywood, and politicians, and it’s both parties. Even worse, they have used 9/11/01 to foist some of the worst human rights violations on American citizens by simply saying, “We’re protecting you.”

Warrantless wiretapping and pretty much all of the Patriot Act violates the 4^th amendment. When these programs are challenged, we are told that we are being kept safe and that the number of terrorists caught through these means is top secret. I’m not going to say I’m a big Rand Paul supporter, but you can see I’m not a Chris Christie or Jeb Bush supporter on these issues either.

People have pretty much given up their right to privacy at airports because the TSA supposedly keeps us safe. Of course they have yet to prevent a single terrorist act and they fail 95% of their training inspections. Meanwhile, terrorists are walking, hiking, driving, and boating across our porous borders and setting up training camps right here in the good old US of A. Heaven forbid anybody talks about securing the borders because that’s racist. Of course I get no help from the GOP because Donald Trump likes to say that Mexico has a policy of sending their criminals to the US, so all conservatives are painted with the broad racist brush. So, the fantasy land people who still believe “it will never happen here” are letting terrorists cross into the US and then giving them aid and comfort in so-called sanctuary cities.

Oh my goodness! Sanctuary cities! I could go on for days about that. The same social liberals who are decrying Democrat Kim Davis for not doing her job and giving same-sex marriage licenses as prescribed by US Law give a pass to Democrat elected officials for not doing their job of deporting known illegal immigrants as prescribed by US Law. If a county clerk doesn’t give out marriage licenses, people’s feelings get hurt. If we don’t deport illegal immigrants, the economy is hurt because 5.1% of America’s workforce is made up of illegal immigrants. The safety of citizens is put in jeopardy because many of the people in these “sanctuary cities” are violent felons.

Don’t get me wrong. I know that most illegal immigrants are not terrorists or violent felons and in fact, by and large, illegal immigrants are better citizens than legal American citizens are. But when the government doesn’t do its job of protecting our borders, it’s not just bad people who come in, but illegal guns (used in 40% of firearm crimes), illegal drugs, and more.

Time to Remember

I’m not trying to scare people. I’m trying to wake people up. We, as a nation have forgotten again. We may remember the horror of September 11^th, 2001, but we seem to have forgotten what caused 9/11. Remembering goes beyond just remembering where you were that day or what you felt. Remembering means not forgetting how it happened. Remembering means not shirking your civic responsibility as a citizen.

It is obvious that many parents have fallen back asleep because their kids are asleep. It is obvious many teachers have fallen back asleep because their students are asleep. It is obvious that our government has fallen back asleep because they have abandoned their responsibility of protecting our nation.

It’s time to wake up or it won’t be long until the next alarm clock goes off. The next alarm clock may not be “workplace violence” on a military base. The next alarm clock may not be a pressure cooker bomb at a sporting event. The next alarm clock may not even come in the form of planes flying into buildings. The next alarm clock may come in the form of a mushroom cloud over a large American city. Or worse, it could come in the form of a North Korean or Iranian 300 mile high aerial nuclear explosion that would cause a powerful Electromagnetic Pulse or EMP over the central US which would send us screaming backwards 200 years technologically. The results would be catastrophic.

It's time to wake up, it's time to remember, and it's time to act.