“Obama to visit Ground Zero on Thursday, May 5, 2011 following bin Laden’s killing.”
— News reports
“Nine years and eight months ago a faraway fanatic brought forth on this continent a new notion, conceived in Kandahar and dedicated to the proposition that the American republic is a house of cards. Now we are engaged in a great War on Terror, testing whether our nation or any nation so easily enticed into bankrupting itself and its principles can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to commemorate the end of this mastermind who devoted his life to our republic’s demise.
“It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, he could not dismantle, he could not demolish, he could not desecrate our Constitution. A population of petrified pygmies, Republican and Democrat who proved so ready to jettison liberties for promises of safety have damaged it far above his poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember his videotaped rants, but it can never forget what we did to ourselves. It is for us now rather to be dedicated here to ending the nightmare which they who have terrorized us with what happened that day have thus far so glibly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that with this monster’s death we return to our senses and our Constitution — that we here highly resolve that the victims of a decade of lunacy shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new restoration, and that the pre-9/11, pre-Empire, pre-Corporate American republic shall not perish from the earth.”
Niranjan Ramakrishnan lives on the West Coast. He can be reached at njn_2003 at yahoo.com.
