Subject: November 11th Reflections on September 11th
The destruction of the World Trade Center (Twin Towers) in New York City, and the partial destruction of The Pentagon, in Washington, D.C. by Islamic terrorists on September 11, 2001, was correctly labeled by our government an "act of war" against the American people. The method of attack, simultaneous hijackings of civilian aircraft, and the subsequent crashing of the aircraft into these targets, was an act of such unthinkable brutality that most Americans cannot fathom the degree of evil involved. We are not programmed to accept that human beings can be capable of imagining, planning, and then carrying out the mass-murder of thousands of men, women, and children who were guilty only of going about their daily routines. These victims were civilians, they never had the opportunity to defend themselves, and they never saw the faces of their killers.
In war, the participants who wage the battles must be prepared to die for their beliefs. Their families and loved ones must understand that the soldier is in danger at all times, during conflict. In Vietnam, over 58,000 soldiers, both men and women, gave their lives in service to America.
Another 2000 are listed as "Missing in Action". All of these men and women understood and accepted their roles as front-line participants in armed conflict. They have been recognized (belatedly) for making the ultimate sacrifice in defense of our freedom. They have been memorialized on "The Wall" in Washington, D.C.
But what of the innocent delivery person, the stockbroker, the restaurant worker, the mother, the father, the maintenance person, the client, the secretary, the security guard, and the child who now lay buried beneath uncountable tons of concrete and steel in lower Manhattan and Washington, D.C.? What of the innocent airplane passengers whose lives were extinguished simply because they occupied space on planes converted to missiles by monsters who wanted to make a statement? What is their due? How do we reconcile their accounts? What sense do we make of the senseless? There is no "fair" way to compensate their familys' or our grief. There is no "nice" solution to the challenge that has been issued from the shadowlands that give birth to these monsters. Yes, there are places on our planet that gleefully support random slaughter of innocent men, women, and children. The causes that these cowards espouse vary, but, all of them have one central goal; to murder as many Americans as possible; to disrupt, and eventually, destroy the American way of life. We must respond. We must hold them accountable for their atrocities. We must not be "fair", and we must not be "nice". An "act of war" requires that we respond in kind. We must be warriors. We must be resolute and have the courage of our convictions. We must reconcile the accounts of our dead citizens.
Terrorists deal in fear, and unfortunately, many of us are fearful. They have turned our openness against us, using our resources, our technology, and our willingness to accept all people into our society, as weapons of fear. They dressed as we do, they studied at our learning institutions, and they blended into our daily lives. We must respond, but, who is responsible?
Terror cannot exist in the light. It will not grow in the open. Terror must be clandestine, faceless, and amorphous. It requires a host to spew its seeds, and we know who the hosts are, and where they are located. We know about Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya. We know that the seeds of terror have been welcomed by the murderers who control these pieces of our planet. We know that these murderers nurture and cultivate terror in order to maintain power over the hapless minions who comprise their populations. Terror is as effective within their borders as it is within our own.
We have the resources to turn the lights on in all of these areas. We can make the darkness that terror needs to thrive disappear instantly. We have the power to eradicate terror completely; and we must employ this power decisively.
Most importantly, we must ensure that such atrocities never occur again. A hostile group has initiated the use of force against our nation; we have a moral obligation to respond to this act. We must not hesitate to defend ourselves; we must not allow our humanity to stall our response. A world absent terror is a world of life. We have the power to ensure life on Earth and we must exercise this power now. Illuminate the darkness, eliminate terror, and move on with our lives. This is the right course of action.
Sunday, November 11, 2001
Monday, September 17, 2001
A Search to Understand
A Search to Understand
Every morning I drive over the Great South Bay bridge, cross the State boat channel bascule bridge and head west along Ocean Parkway towards Meadowbrook and eventually JFK Airport. On Tuesday morning, September 11, the sun made the sky and water blue. The radio announcer said it was a top ten, meaning one of the ten best weather days we would have all year. There were two boats on the bay. I remembered back to years ago when there were hundreds of clam boats on the bay.
As Tuesday's events unfolded, it became obvious that our world has changed forever. F15 fighter jets from McQuire Air Force Base circled JFK Airport. Armed security officers searched roofs of buildings. All types of road closures made travel almost impossible. When I got home, I put up the American flag.
Wednesday morning I saw an aircraft carrier with F 18s not far off the shore of Gilgo Beach. I have never seen an aircraft carrier at sea so close to shore. The next day a Navy destroyer joined it.
Todd, my next door neighbor, a NYC fireman was called to the Trade Center to search for bodies. He has only been home a few hours in the past week.
I listened to the National Day of Mourning Services held in Washington on Friday afternoon. Reverend Billy Graham spoke and reminded the congregation that God is with us through these troubled times. At Sunday’s church service at Cross of Christ Lutheran Church in Babylon, Pastor Bond’s sermon expressed similar thoughts and prayers. We sang Martin Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.”
The terrorist’s attack on civilization has caused the President of the United States to declare war. Personally, I have struggled to fathom the depths of evil, the intense hatred that not only planned, but also carried out the atrocity perpetrated on the innocent.
The fictional character, John Galt has a soliloquy, in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” I have paraphrased the author’s words from pages 930 to 970 and offer them herein, as I search to understand this act of evil.
In part, Galt states, “ The question to be or not to be, is to think or not to think. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking.
A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality. There is only one price that pays for man’s survival: reason. Every man is an end of himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest morale purpose. “
“It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live. No, you do not have to live, you must live as a man-by the work and judgement of your mind.
Man can not survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty he perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to reason; his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by the mind.
My (Galt’s) morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists-and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason - Purpose - Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge-Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve-Self esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man’s virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness and pride.
…To withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement-that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devalue your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only evil can profit-and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.
Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man can commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together no man may initiate-do you hear me? No man may start-the use of physical force against others.
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. …And death by a process of gradual destruction is all that you (the terrorist) and your system will achieve.”
“I do not want to grant the terms of reason to men who propose to deprive me of reason. I do not place any moral sanction upon a murder’s wish to kill me. When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him-by force.
It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own. He uses force to seize a value; I use it only to destroy destruction. A holdup man seeks wealth by killing me; I do not grow richer by killing a hold up man. I seek no values by means of evil, nor do I surrender my values to evil.
Our terms and our motive power are antithesis of yours. You (the terrorist) have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death to man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his reward for accepting ours.
Building is not done by abstaining from destruction…. It will not raise one single girder. …And now you (the terrorist) cannot say to me, the builder: “Produce and feed us in exchange for our not destroying your production.” I am answering in the name of all your victims: Perish with and in your own void. Existence is not a negation of negatives. Evil not value is an absence and a negation; evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us. Perish, because we have learned that a zero (terrorist) cannot hold a mortgage over life.
You (the terrorist) do not wish to live. … The only act that can save you: thinking. Yours is the morality of death.
Death is the standard of your values, death is your chosen goal, and you have to keep running, since there is no escape from the pursuer who is out to destroy you or from the knowledge that the pursuer is yourself.
Damnation is the start of your morality; destruction is its purpose, means and end.”
To the reader - “it is your mind they (the terrorists) want you to surrender.”
“Those irrational wishes that draw you (enlistees) to their (terrorist’s) creed, those emotions you worship as an idol, on whose alter you sacrifice the earth, that dark incoherent passion within you, which you take as the voice of (your) god or your glands, is nothing more than the corpse of your mind. An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.
As they (the terrorists) seek, not to build, but to take over industrial plants (or destroy the World Trade Towers), so they seek not to think, but to take over human thinking. They are attempting to take us back to darker ages then any our history has known. Their goal is not the era of pre-science, but the era of pre-language.
Make no mistake about the character of terrorists. To undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose throughout the ages-and power, the power to rule by force, has always been their only lust.”
This is why the President said we must retaliate.
Henry W. Hessing, PE
Every morning I drive over the Great South Bay bridge, cross the State boat channel bascule bridge and head west along Ocean Parkway towards Meadowbrook and eventually JFK Airport. On Tuesday morning, September 11, the sun made the sky and water blue. The radio announcer said it was a top ten, meaning one of the ten best weather days we would have all year. There were two boats on the bay. I remembered back to years ago when there were hundreds of clam boats on the bay.
As Tuesday's events unfolded, it became obvious that our world has changed forever. F15 fighter jets from McQuire Air Force Base circled JFK Airport. Armed security officers searched roofs of buildings. All types of road closures made travel almost impossible. When I got home, I put up the American flag.
Wednesday morning I saw an aircraft carrier with F 18s not far off the shore of Gilgo Beach. I have never seen an aircraft carrier at sea so close to shore. The next day a Navy destroyer joined it.
Todd, my next door neighbor, a NYC fireman was called to the Trade Center to search for bodies. He has only been home a few hours in the past week.
I listened to the National Day of Mourning Services held in Washington on Friday afternoon. Reverend Billy Graham spoke and reminded the congregation that God is with us through these troubled times. At Sunday’s church service at Cross of Christ Lutheran Church in Babylon, Pastor Bond’s sermon expressed similar thoughts and prayers. We sang Martin Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.”
The terrorist’s attack on civilization has caused the President of the United States to declare war. Personally, I have struggled to fathom the depths of evil, the intense hatred that not only planned, but also carried out the atrocity perpetrated on the innocent.
The fictional character, John Galt has a soliloquy, in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” I have paraphrased the author’s words from pages 930 to 970 and offer them herein, as I search to understand this act of evil.
In part, Galt states, “ The question to be or not to be, is to think or not to think. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking.
A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality. There is only one price that pays for man’s survival: reason. Every man is an end of himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest morale purpose. “
“It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live. No, you do not have to live, you must live as a man-by the work and judgement of your mind.
Man can not survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty he perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to reason; his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by the mind.
My (Galt’s) morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists-and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason - Purpose - Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge-Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve-Self esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man’s virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness and pride.
…To withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement-that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devalue your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only evil can profit-and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.
Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man can commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together no man may initiate-do you hear me? No man may start-the use of physical force against others.
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. …And death by a process of gradual destruction is all that you (the terrorist) and your system will achieve.”
“I do not want to grant the terms of reason to men who propose to deprive me of reason. I do not place any moral sanction upon a murder’s wish to kill me. When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him-by force.
It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own. He uses force to seize a value; I use it only to destroy destruction. A holdup man seeks wealth by killing me; I do not grow richer by killing a hold up man. I seek no values by means of evil, nor do I surrender my values to evil.
Our terms and our motive power are antithesis of yours. You (the terrorist) have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death to man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his reward for accepting ours.
Building is not done by abstaining from destruction…. It will not raise one single girder. …And now you (the terrorist) cannot say to me, the builder: “Produce and feed us in exchange for our not destroying your production.” I am answering in the name of all your victims: Perish with and in your own void. Existence is not a negation of negatives. Evil not value is an absence and a negation; evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us. Perish, because we have learned that a zero (terrorist) cannot hold a mortgage over life.
You (the terrorist) do not wish to live. … The only act that can save you: thinking. Yours is the morality of death.
Death is the standard of your values, death is your chosen goal, and you have to keep running, since there is no escape from the pursuer who is out to destroy you or from the knowledge that the pursuer is yourself.
Damnation is the start of your morality; destruction is its purpose, means and end.”
To the reader - “it is your mind they (the terrorists) want you to surrender.”
“Those irrational wishes that draw you (enlistees) to their (terrorist’s) creed, those emotions you worship as an idol, on whose alter you sacrifice the earth, that dark incoherent passion within you, which you take as the voice of (your) god or your glands, is nothing more than the corpse of your mind. An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.
As they (the terrorists) seek, not to build, but to take over industrial plants (or destroy the World Trade Towers), so they seek not to think, but to take over human thinking. They are attempting to take us back to darker ages then any our history has known. Their goal is not the era of pre-science, but the era of pre-language.
Make no mistake about the character of terrorists. To undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose throughout the ages-and power, the power to rule by force, has always been their only lust.”
This is why the President said we must retaliate.
Henry W. Hessing, PE
Sunday, August 19, 2001
Why China?
Why China?
Should being selected to host the 2008 Summer Olympic Games honor China?
Baron de Coubertin’s purpose in creating the Modern Olympic Games was based on a belief of rights of the individual. He said: “The Olympiads have been reestablished for the rare and solemn glorification of the individual athlete…” Individuals could strive for moral as well as athletic excellence.
China’s Communist government contradicts the Baron’s purpose. Can individualism be achieved in a totalitarian state in which an individual has no rights?
Andrew Bernstein, Ph.D. wrote an open letter to the IOC. His comments are paraphrased as follows:
“China’s law mandates one child per family. Those who break the law abandon children to state orphanages by the tens of thousands. According to Human Rights Watch/Asia “China’s official policy is one of nutritional and medical neglect with the intent of inducing death. The Shanghai Children’s Welfare Institute, China’s most prestigious orphanage has a child mortality rate of 90 percent during the late 1980s and 1990s.”
Have we forgotten news coverage and photographs of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-freedom activists? Is life any better for Christians and other religious denominations in China today?
Harry Wu survived 19 years in forced labor camps. The author and human rights activist points out that these camps hold between 4 and 6 million prisoners. “Many of these slaves are political and/or religious dissidents, held without due process. Their transgression was opposition to their Communist rulers.”
In the 1999 Harvard University Press release, The Black Book of Communism, researchers established that Mao Zedong and his successors murdered 65 million Chinese. Indiana’s state representative Jim Atterholt referred to China’s political leaders as the “Butchers of Beijing.”
“China is not content with slaughtering and enslaving its own people. China supported the murderous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia,” North Viet Nam against South Viet Nam, North Korea against South Korea, “brutally conquered Tibet and threatened Taiwan.”
“If China does not protect the rights of its own citizens and openly commits aggression against foreign countries, should it compete or host an Olympics? Why should the International Olympic Committee (IOC) legitimize Beijing’s power over its own subjects? Why do civilized countries deem China worthy of the honor to host the Olympics? China is a murderous dictatorship. It kills its children.” What propaganda can legitimately mask this carnage?
Apologists will say, “that the Olympic games will not be interpreted by China’s leaders as a reward for past misdeeds, but as an incentive to increase their toleration of dissent. The political pressure of being in the Olympic spotlight will help to open up China.”
Exactly how is this going to happen? Is there a precedent? Did the IOC use this leverage to stop Soviet tanks from rolling into Afghanistan during the 1980 Olympics?
Bob Tracinski, a columnist for Creator’s Syndicate wrote, “The tragedy of the IOC’s decision is not so much the reward that has been granted to China’s dictatorship: it is the fact that, just as in the years leading up to World War II, the free nations of the world have lost the moral confidence to judge, to condemn, and to ostracize the world’s dictators.”
The Olympics celebrate man at his best. The IOC did not stand tall for moral principles and the dignity of man when they selected China, to host the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.
Henry W. Hessing
Should being selected to host the 2008 Summer Olympic Games honor China?
Baron de Coubertin’s purpose in creating the Modern Olympic Games was based on a belief of rights of the individual. He said: “The Olympiads have been reestablished for the rare and solemn glorification of the individual athlete…” Individuals could strive for moral as well as athletic excellence.
China’s Communist government contradicts the Baron’s purpose. Can individualism be achieved in a totalitarian state in which an individual has no rights?
Andrew Bernstein, Ph.D. wrote an open letter to the IOC. His comments are paraphrased as follows:
“China’s law mandates one child per family. Those who break the law abandon children to state orphanages by the tens of thousands. According to Human Rights Watch/Asia “China’s official policy is one of nutritional and medical neglect with the intent of inducing death. The Shanghai Children’s Welfare Institute, China’s most prestigious orphanage has a child mortality rate of 90 percent during the late 1980s and 1990s.”
Have we forgotten news coverage and photographs of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-freedom activists? Is life any better for Christians and other religious denominations in China today?
Harry Wu survived 19 years in forced labor camps. The author and human rights activist points out that these camps hold between 4 and 6 million prisoners. “Many of these slaves are political and/or religious dissidents, held without due process. Their transgression was opposition to their Communist rulers.”
In the 1999 Harvard University Press release, The Black Book of Communism, researchers established that Mao Zedong and his successors murdered 65 million Chinese. Indiana’s state representative Jim Atterholt referred to China’s political leaders as the “Butchers of Beijing.”
“China is not content with slaughtering and enslaving its own people. China supported the murderous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia,” North Viet Nam against South Viet Nam, North Korea against South Korea, “brutally conquered Tibet and threatened Taiwan.”
“If China does not protect the rights of its own citizens and openly commits aggression against foreign countries, should it compete or host an Olympics? Why should the International Olympic Committee (IOC) legitimize Beijing’s power over its own subjects? Why do civilized countries deem China worthy of the honor to host the Olympics? China is a murderous dictatorship. It kills its children.” What propaganda can legitimately mask this carnage?
Apologists will say, “that the Olympic games will not be interpreted by China’s leaders as a reward for past misdeeds, but as an incentive to increase their toleration of dissent. The political pressure of being in the Olympic spotlight will help to open up China.”
Exactly how is this going to happen? Is there a precedent? Did the IOC use this leverage to stop Soviet tanks from rolling into Afghanistan during the 1980 Olympics?
Bob Tracinski, a columnist for Creator’s Syndicate wrote, “The tragedy of the IOC’s decision is not so much the reward that has been granted to China’s dictatorship: it is the fact that, just as in the years leading up to World War II, the free nations of the world have lost the moral confidence to judge, to condemn, and to ostracize the world’s dictators.”
The Olympics celebrate man at his best. The IOC did not stand tall for moral principles and the dignity of man when they selected China, to host the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.
Henry W. Hessing
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