Thinking of September 11, 2001, I recall the disbelief I held as I watched TV coverage of the tragic event of two airliners striking the World Trade Centers, the buildings collapsing in real time. It just didn't seem real. How could this happen in the United States?
Then this morning, September 11th, 2025, as I listened to Bernie Sanders speak at a Town Hall Meeting at Brooklyn College on September 8th about unprecedented current events ongoing in America in 2025, I realized disbelief is a similar recurring nightmare in which newscasts the world over describe the ideological attack on our country and are invariably linked to Donald Trump's election to the presidency of the United States in 2024.
At 3:48 AM, I'm thinking about a graphic similar to THE RAVEN Volume 6 Issue 3 cover, that I designed and published in 2002 that one RAVEN subscriber said she hung on her office wall in the federal building in Chicago.
The difficulty being that it would have to somewhat symbolize the loudest moan of anguish here, I ever heard, that thundered from a upstairs bedroom in this particular home in Palmville when election results were announced in 2024. It would have to somewhat symbolize each and every September 11th as though those thousands killed in all those buildings and across a field in Pennsylvania were immolated as in deference to the words the late conservative activist/Trump worshipper Charlie Kirk is said to have stated, in defense of the 2nd Amendment,
"It was worth it to accept some ... deaths." Now he's a martyr.
I'm starting to believe we're not in Kansas anymore Toto. What will future days bring?
Somewhere in the 15-1600s, Shakespeare wrote his 119th Sonnet which provides solace to me. We find ourselves at this worrisome point in time, but know for sure that good will out. With regard to our current horrid distractions, Shakespeare exclaims, "O benefit of ill! now I find true/That better is by evil still made better;/And ruin’d love, when it is build anew,/
ReplyDeleteGrows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater./So I return rebuked to my content/And gain by ills thrice more than I have spent. Augustine, Jung and others write marvelously about evils role. We gotta trust the process unfolding and continue to let the light shine.
Effective graphic, BTW.
Good one. Thanks.
DeleteHave the terrorists won? TBD. I'm with Shakespeare, teapoetry and the rest. You too WW
ReplyDeleteA cogent reminder that we are never safe, yet we can relish the moments of shared joy. Fairly warned. Always ready. The dance goes on.
ReplyDeleteThe full quote, if anyone is interested: AUDIENCE QUESTION: How's it going, Charlie? I'm Austin. I just had a question related to Second Amendment rights. We saw the shooting that happened recently and a lot of people are upset. But, I'm seeing people argue for the other side that they want to take our Second Amendment rights away. How do we convince them that it's important to have the right to defend ourselves and all that good stuff?
ReplyDeleteCHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, it's a great question. Thank you. So, I'm a big Second Amendment fan but I think most politicians are cowards when it comes to defending why we have a Second Amendment. This is why I would not be a good politician, or maybe I would, I don't know, because I actually speak my mind.
The Second Amendment is not about hunting. I love hunting. The Second Amendment is not even about personal defense. That is important. The Second Amendment is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government. And if that talk scares you — "wow, that's radical, Charlie, I don't know about that" — well then, you have not really read any of the literature of our Founding Fathers. Number two, you've not read any 20th-century history. You're just living in Narnia. By the way, if you're actually living in Narnia, you would be wiser than wherever you're living, because C.S. Lewis was really smart. So I don't know what alternative universe you're living in. You just don't want to face reality that governments tend to get tyrannical and that if people need an ability to protect themselves and their communities and their families.
Now, we must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty. Driving comes with a price. 50,000, 50,000, 50,000 people die on the road every year. That's a price. You get rid of driving, you'd have 50,000 less auto fatalities. But we have decided that the benefit of driving — speed, accessibility, mobility, having products, services — is worth the cost of 50,000 people dying on the road. So we need to be very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen. You could significantly reduce them through having more fathers in the home, by having more armed guards in front of schools. We should have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should not have a utopian one.
You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It's drivel. But I am, I, I — I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.
So then, how do you reduce? Very simple. People say, oh, Charlie, how do you stop school shootings? I don't know. How did we stop shootings at baseball games? Because we have armed guards outside of baseball games. That's why. How did we stop all the shootings at airports? We have armed guards outside of airports. How do we stop all the shootings at banks? We have armed guards outside of banks. How did we stop all the shootings at gun shows? Notice there's not a lot of mass shootings at gun shows, there's all these guns. Because everyone's armed. If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don't our children?