"A grievance culture"

Bill Bennett thinks we've lost our post-9/11 anger. Perhaps, but I don't think of it as anger--more as a kind of deep recognition that this is a dangerous world, and that we can't hide here in isolation and ignore things like terrorism, like we did all through the 1990s; and a determination to face up to that reality and defend ourselves. We take it for granted that our prosperity will continue, our lives will be better and better, without being called upon to sacrifice as previous generations did. My mother told me often about how she and her sister would walk along the railroad tracks when she was a girl picking up pieces of coal to take home in a gunny sack. Her mother was a widow with eight children during the Depression. One of her older brothers was killed in the South Pacific in WWII and another was captured at Corregidor in the Phillipines and held at Cabanatuan until the end of the war. I was born in 1948.

While I never had to live with hardship like that, I have a real sense that we live on a bubble, in a time and place that is exceptional in the history of the world. I don't expect it to go on indefinitely, and neither should anybody else. Nor do I believe that we can continue to support people who refuse to work, whether they're idle rich or idle poor, or who aren't loyal to this country. We have bred many enemies within our own society, people who see themselves as exceptional and are furious that they aren't the rulers. They see socialism as the answer to all problems, and are willing to achieve it by force, so long as they are in the governing class. I can't see any other reason for them to be so enraged about their political losses. Practical people would see losing elections as a clue that they need to become more in tune with the voters. These people see it as proof that the voters are stupid, and just rail against them. They assume that the elections are rigged by their opponents and become more angry.

I thought, after 9/11, that we'd have been shocked back to our senses, but that wore off astonishingly quickly. I guess it's just human nature, but you'd think that the moment of realization that those tiny objects dropping down the sides of the WTC towers were people would have remained fixed in one's mind and that people who would perpetrate such things have placed themselves outside of the community of the civilized and would have to be hunted down and destroyed. Sadly, it hasn't turned out that way.