Moment of Silence

[gordo]

chas:

Have to say amen to your reply. Been around Veterans that were on the frontlines earning our freedoms my whole life, and our right when you say that there are alot of people (typically the younger ones) that do not know the price of freedom. My comment is not meant so much as an attack on them, just a wake up. A tremendous price has been paid to allow us our freedoms. Just a side note, to give some perspective on the cost to our country, I heard somewhere (on the history channel?), that the number of casualties that were expected when they were planning for the invasion of Japan in WWII was so great that the Purple Hearts are still in government storage. All subsequent Purple Hearts that have been issued since the end of WWII have been issued from those ordered for that invasion.

It's not free - we must earn it.

 

[trader88]

Originally posted by OPTIONAL777


Spoken like a true internet message board patriot.

Do not underestimate the posters on this thread. There are many here who will serve when duty calls.

 

[OPTIONAL777]

Originally posted by trader88


Do not underestimate the posters on this thread. There are many here who will serve when duty calls.

Duty calls a true patriot each and every day. Speaking out on a message board is hardly the measure of a patriot.

Kind of like people who go to church on Sunday, and sin the rest of the week, claiming to be "saved."

777

 

[Minime]

Originally posted by regough


O.K., then can you tell me why millions of Iraqis support Saddam- what am I missing here ? ? ? ? ?

You would too if they killed you and all your extended family for not smiling at the right time. Edit: misread your post the first time. But I'm sure this is partially why they kiss his rear.

 

[chasinfla]

''(Both are) victims of non-peaceful means and acts out of the norms of international law,'' Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz said in a telegram to former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, according to the Iraqi News Agency.

sound's like some who have posted on this very thread.

 

[chasinfla]

The hero is a feeling, a man seen
As if the eye was an emotion,
As if in seeing we saw our feeling
In the object seen
. . . Wallace Stevens, "Examination of a Hero in a Time of War"



WASHINGTON — In our mind's eye we see them, the police and firefighters, the passengers of United Flight 93 and all the others who disappeared behaving nobly. The mind's eye holds a mixture of emotions, including anger, directed at primitive enemies from abroad, and at the faux sophistication of some homegrown thinking.


The thinking is as contemptible as, and more dangerous than, any foreign enemy, now or ever, because its agenda is to discredit ideas that make nobility intelligible and hence heroism possible. Last Sept. 11 was, among other things, the Great Refutation. And perhaps a catalyst of a sustained restoration.


Ideas have consequences — indeed, only ideas have large and lasting consequences — so history is, at bottom, the history of mind. The acts of war a year ago made up our nation's mind, as one restores order to an unmade bed.


We made up our mind to fight, of course, but also to become virtuously intolerant of a certain kind of nonsense, including the notion that tolerance is everything because everything else is nothing — nothing but opinion or chimera.


The postmodern plague of quotation marks — the punctuation of disparagement that labels as superstitions "virtue" and "heroism" and most of the other things that make life worth living — was erased by men running into burning buildings, men who had not been disabled by today's higher learning. The quotation marks remaining after the Great Refutation surround two words: "Let's roll!"


The cultural relativism that gives rise to the fetish of multiculturalism — "It is mere ethnocentric arrogance to say one culture is superior to any other" — was incinerated by burning jet fuel. Reductionism — the realism of people blind to reality — holds that individuals are just soups of chemical reactions, that all motives are banal and tawdry, that the best biographies are pathographies, piercing the veil of human greatness to reveal grounds for diminishment. Thus is mind, and hence valor, drained from history.


The blowsy handmaiden of all this is the notion that everything can be understood as an emanation of this or that culture, no one of which is superior to any other, and therefore to understand is to forgive. But to understand our enemies is to know they must be smashed.


Susceptibility to feelings of civic guilt and a tendency to social hypochondria are two generally healthy American attributes traceable to the Republic's founding — to living in the long shadow cast by the great men whose rhetoric and documents gave vitality to great principles. So last Sept. 11, there was an American reflex to ask, self-accusingly: "What did we do?"


The reflex was wrong. Our enemies attacked us not for what we have done but for what we are. And because of the attacks, we are even more intensely what we are, a nation defined by our unum, not our pluribus.


The nation's great seal, proclaiming e pluribus unum, was adopted in 1782, five years before the Constitution was written, and six years after the Declaration of Independence, with its declaration of equality of rights, made us, as Lincoln was to say at Gettysburg, a nation dedicated to a proposition.


The proposition, and all it entails, enrages, to the point of derangement, our enemies. So we fight.


Emerson who spent much time around high-minded abolitionists, probably startled, even scandalized many readers when he wrote that war can "educate the senses, call into action the will, and perfect the physical constitution." Hence his exclamation at the outbreak of the Civil War: "Ah! sometimes gunpowder smells good."


Sometimes gunpowder does smell good because civilization — especially the highest, ours — is not inevitable. So we fight.

--George F. Will

 

[trader88]

Originally posted by OPTIONAL777


Duty calls a true patriot each and every day. Speaking out on a message board is hardly the measure of a patriot.

Kind of like people who go to church on Sunday, and sin the rest of the week, claiming to be "saved."

777

Totally agree with you Optional. Do not agree with you though on your implication that the posters here are all armchair patriots. Perhaps some are, but some definitely aren't.

 

[OPTIONAL777]

Originally posted by trader88


Totally agree with you Optional. Do not agree with you though on your implication that the posters here are all armchair patriots. Perhaps some are, but some definitely aren't.

Any generalization is just that, there are almost always exceptions to a generalization. Those who know internally that they are truly patriotic, they don't need my approval, nor are they concerned about my criticisms.

777

 

[Gordon Gekko]

Originally posted by uptik2000
I'm not a big believer in the supernatural, ghosts, spirits , etc...but it was strange how the winds were gusting in NY this morning. From 8am until just a while ago winds were so strong they blew a plant off my windowsill, and papers all over the place.
Strange. Very, very strange.

not to put you down, but people like to take a coincidence and believe there's more to it than there really is. i saw a news reporter speak from ground zero today and she said the same thing you did. she said the wind was the souls of those who died on 9/11. well, all i gotta say is, i live in massachusetts and it is windy as hell here today. there has been a big sunflower plant in my backyard all summer, but today, the wind snapped it in half. it would be nice to think it were souls, but maybe it's just a windy day.

i said in another post that bill o'reilly (fox news) said it must be divine intervention when NY was looking to win the world series after 9/11. however, we would later find out that they lost. o'reilly didn't mention this specific divine intervention again. he was so sure there was more to it than coincidence before they lost though!

 

[chasinfla]

=DJ Was S&P Futures Close At 911 Tuesday Just A Coincidence?

By Kristina Zurla
Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES

CHICAGO (Dow Jones)--In an ironic twist, the September Standard & Poor's 500 futures contract closed Tuesday at 911.00 - a day ahead of the one-year anniversary of the infamous terrorist attacks.

There was some buzz on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange stock index futures trading floor Wednesday about why this occurred, but there were no reports of widespread collusion or price-fixing going on.

"It was bizarre, it was strange, but it wasn't manufactured," said Richard Canlione, vice president of institutional financial futures at Salomon Smith Barney. "It was just the rules of coincidence affecting open outcry trade. That's just where the market was."

While some CME traders reported there were notable offers to sell as the market approached 912.00, anyone trying to force the market to actually print a settlement of 911.00 exactly would face an extremely difficult task in a market so large, and liquid.

"It just proves the market God was with us, remembering the day, too," said one CME trader.

The start of trading was delayed Wednesday in honor of those killed in last year's attacks that hit the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania.

Market players noted prices were already moving higher throughout Tuesday after two prior up days, so it wasn't like an abrupt change in direction took place to achieve the numerical equivalent of Sept. 11.

Some thought perhaps suspicious activity could have taken place, but most brushed it off as a "patriotic rally" and didn't seem the harm in it.

"I'm always kinda paranoid, and I find the fact that we settled there kind of eerie, but I don't think we should dwell on it or read too much into it," said Tim Haefke, a stock index futures trader and president of Top-Notch Trading.

-By Kristina Zurla, Dow Jones Newswires; 312-750-4132; kristina.zurla@dowjones.com


(END) DOW JONES NEWS 09-11-02
02:38 PM- - 02 38 PM EDT 09-11-02