9/11.

I can in no way ‘beat’ my friend and colleague Dan McLaughlin’s essay on 9/11, and I am not going to try. I was more fortunate than Dan: the World Trade Center was part of my alternate commute, and by September 2001 I was far away from the area anyway (due to an emergency move a few months earlier). But: they tried to kill me, too.  I was just lucky enough not to be there when they took their shot.

Not much else to say, at this point, except for the obvious: I am alive, Osama bin Laden is dead, and that’s just fine with me*. Also: I have long taken the position that there were two ways people reacted to 9/11.  People either got scared, or they got angry.  I got angry; and I’m pretty sure that this was the psychologically healthy reaction**. Because it’s bad to be afraid all of the time. Messes up your head.

Moe Lane

*Taunting the living can have a purpose; taunting the dead usually does not.

**Some of the people who got scared also got violent about it, as an examination of the career arc of, say, Little Green Footballs will demonstrate.