Six years ago today I woke up to an ordinary day and headed downstairs for some coffee on my way toward work. My wife was up. I don’t remember if I turned on the television or if it was already on. I don’t remember if I was flipping through the channels or not.

I do remember being surprised to hear that three, or was it four, planes had been simultaneously hijacked by terrorists and that one of them had flown into the world trade center. There was all sorts of chatter on the television. I remember my reaction when I watched the second plane fly into the world trade center on live television.

I was shocked when I heard about the first plane. I was outraged when I watched the second one. I remember distinctly turning to my wife and telling her that this wasn’t just terrorism, this was an act of war.

We watched in fascinated horror as the twin towers collapsed. I cried when I saw people literally jumping out broken windows to avoid the pain of dying by fire. I was filled with mixed joy and anguish over the plane that went down in a field instead of plowing into the White House or the Pentagon, or whatever it’s presumed target was. I knew it all for an act of war as I watched the fires burn and saw the gaping hole in the Pentagon.

Things changed for me that day.

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Up until that point I had pretty much been a wanderer as far as my political philosophy goes. In my adolescence, I thought I wanted to be an anarchist. If “that government is best which governs least” was true then the best possible government would be no government.

When I went to college, in the late seventies, I wanted it to be like the sixties. I wanted to join in the “free love”, drug-abusing, hippie style lifestyle. I wanted to be a hedonist and a protester. It didn’t take too long to cure me of that foolishness, since what I really was was reckless and irresponsible, and it cost me a few scholarships.

While I was in college I read all of the posters that people stapled to telephone poles and taped to light posts. A few that really caught my eye complained about the oppression of the Shah of Iran.

The rhetoric was remarkably similar to a lot of what we can see on posters taped to light posts and stapled to telephone poles today. And I fell for it. I contributed money to the cause. I regret it to this day.

Not long after that the Shah was deposed and the Ayatollahs replaced him. Not long after that, hundreds of American citizens were kidnapped, some murdered, and the others held hostage by the Iranians for over a year. Jimmy Carter was president.

When we crashed the helicopters in the desert in a failed attempt at rescue it was an embarrassment. A few years later I remember listening to someone (Was it Larry Norman?) saying that “next time, we’ll crash the helicopters even closer”.

In the very first Presidential election I was eligible to vote in, I voted for Ronald Reagan. And then, the hostages were freed. I was still pretty much apolitical, avoiding local elections, and voting Republican in the Presidential ones. My grandmother seemed to hate Ronald Reagan, always referring to him as “the great communicator”.

I moved out to the Pacific Northwest in 1990. Life on the “left coast” gradually re-formed a lot of my political opinions and I found myself more and more on the “liberal” side of the political spectrum. Part of this was due to my own weaknesses and moral failures. Part of it was due to the constant drumbeat of liberal philosophy being pounded into my head everywhere I went.

As the 1990s wore on, terrorism was always there in the background. Our reactions to it have always seemed strange to me. The terrorist acts on our own soil were always treated as mere crimes, while the terrorist acts on foreign soil were usually treated as political statements, requiring a political solution. Often we treated them as crimes and tried to use political pressure on foreign governments to bring the “criminals” to “justice”.

The “Clinton years” were interrupted by investigations and impeachment proceedings. To this day the whole sordid affair is treated as if it was “all about sex”. It was really all about lying all along, but that’s another story. Sadly this acted as a major distraction from issues that really needed to be faced.

Launching missiles into an empty pharmaceuticals factory was seen by a lot of people as an impotent gesture. Many on the right saw it as a transparent attempt to divert political focus from President Clinton’s peccadilloes. I saw it as “crashing the helicopters even closer”.

I don’t recall when it was exactly that I started seriously thinking about my political philosophy, but it was sometime during President Clinton’s second term. I do know that I was tired of high taxes and big government. I know that the antics and behavior of politicians, both Republican and Democratic really bothered me.

At first I thought I might be leaning toward the Libertarian point of view. As time wore on and I gave it more serious thought, I realized that my attitudes were more along “classical liberal” lines, what we today call “conservatism”. By the time of the 2000 Presidential Election I was beginning to pay attention, and was solidly conservative in my beliefs, but I wasn’t that good at articulating them.

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The horrific attacks on September 11, 2001 affected all of us. Up until that point, terrorism was something that happened somewhere else to other people. Those bastards brought it home that they were at war with Americans and with Western Civilization in general. Osama bin Laden had declared war openly, and before 9/11/2001, but now it was plainly obvious that it wasn’t just rhetoric.

Americans died that day. There were many comparisons to World War II and the awakening of “the sleeping giant”. Americans joined together with a unified attitude that we were going to fight back.

People everywhere started putting up flags. I had one in my garage that my brother had given me, and which had never been out of the box. Soon it was up on my fence.

Listening to talk radio and reading Internet opinion sites there were a few people that were wondering how long it would be before this unity dissolved. They were wondering how long it would be before political ideology re-opened a wedge in politics.

It didn’t take long.

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Here we are, six years to the day after we were attacked. For well over half of that time we’ve been fighting against ourselves while a few of us are fighting the enemy.

Once again we’re more concerned about politics than about reality. People are appalled by the amount of our federal budget that is used on the military. They’d rather forget about the terrorists that have declared war upon us and instead concentrate on things that aren’t really the proper business of the federal government.

Has it really been six years? Has it really been only six years? The terrorists that attacked us six years ago today didn’t awaken a sleeping giant. The giant just rolled over and crushed a few of them, but it’s so drugged-out that it may never awaken. Even if it does awaken, it may only be to look into a mirror and preen.

The thousands of people that were murdered on that day should not be forgotten. Sadly it seems that they have been. Our politicians use them as an excuse to fight with one another instead of to band together to fight those that hate us. Half of our citizenry wants to appease these murderers that want to kill us and take our souls.

Some of our “elite” thinkers want to place the blame for those murders at the feet of the victims. They want to know “why they hate us”, even while they themselves appear to be filled with loathing for all that we are.

I think that’s wrong. The blame for this war rests squarely upon the terrorists and upon our own narcissistic, hedonistic, prideful ways. We are, all of us, trapped in a religious war that will not end until we are subjugated and converted to Islam, or until we turn away from our self-absorption and destroy our enemies.

We need to awaken the sleeping giant. We need to, each one of us, turn away from our folly and remember the fallen. We need to grow up and face the world.

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Originally posted at Perri Nelson’s Website.