On 9/11/2001 my child was seven.
My peers and I tried to shield our children from the horror, we tried to keep fear far, far away from them. My child’s Montessori school went one better, focusing on the holiday Ramadan for the first time, (the one instance in which I disagreed with them.). But in general we didn’t focus on the bad guys, the human agents of death. You’re okay, you’re safe, we cooed to our kids morning and evening. It shall not come nigh unto thee.
“Hate” in the abstract, was the enemy.
On this 9/11, if you have or are related to any young children, I have a bit of advice:
Don’t shield them. MAKE THEM WATCH the coverage of the 9/11 attack itself, MAKE them watch Charlie Kirk’s death, the blood blossoming from the fair tower of his throat like the roiling smoke from the twin towers.
And teach them:
Yes, you have an enemy. And faced with that enemy:
Hate is your friend.
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To support your point, Perry E. Metzger’s tweet
When uncivilized people do uncivilized things, the voices in the crowd always call out to the civilized man to abandon his principles, abandon all the hard won effort needed to establish a peaceful and pleasant and free society, and to simply adopt the barbaric behavior and attitudes of the people who would like to end civilization.
When people start whispering into your ear that the only way to preserve the things you hold most dear is to destroy those very things, they’re not advocating for what you want, but rather to destroy everything you want. You cannot fuck yourself to celibacy, you cannot drink your way to sobriety, and you can’t murder your way to civilization.
This does not mean that society needs to put up with threats to the peace; we have developed mechanisms over many centuries for opposing those using civilized means. The problem is never that we’ve held on to civilization when we should have embraced barbarism, but rather that some people have brainwashed themselves to not allow the use the mechanisms that we already have to address threats to the peace.
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