“The Nazis whom we did abhor
Are now completely kinder.
For when they aren’t making war,
No one could be politer.
The rule Miss Liberty with zeal.
They bow with grace and vigor.
The tip their hats and click their heels…
…Before they click the trigger.”
-- E. Y. Harberg
I have come to realize that I haven’t gotten over 9-11. I
was in New York City that day, teaching in the Bronx. I experienced some of the
response to the terror intentions of the attack, as I was unable to use mass
transit to get home. And I worried in subsequent days if I was in the middle of
a target as I passed through Penn and Grand Central railroad stations.
The school I worked in lost six parents from our “family,”
all of them maintenance and clerical people. They were poor people just trying
to earn a living. Ronkonkoma, the Long Island town I lived in, lost eight --
including six cops and firemen. I was in a floral shop ordering flowers for our
son’s wedding reception when I saw a pretty, young, pregnant widow in tears as
she arranged her fireman-husband’s funeral. The ex went to several of the
victim’s funerals, returning in tears each time. I watched as the debris passed
over the East River into Greenpoint Brooklyn and into the lungs of my wife’s
parents and sister – possibly contributing to an earlier death than expected.
And a year later I was teaching lower Manhattan when
helicopters started circling and the school was locked down as there was a
sniper a few blocks away. The children saw a reflection the last day of the
towers and freaked out. They were never the same after that for the entire
year. Every single teacher and the principal chose to leave the school at the
end of the year.
I had a grad school professor who lost a son and watched him
collapse into darkness while trying to hold it together enough to teach the
course.
Never one to be super patriotic, I fly a flag every day
these days to honor them.
And so, more than a decade later, in a single week there was
slaughter of more than 100 children in a school in Pakistani, a lunatic holding
and killing people in a chocolate store in Australia, many innocents being
slaughtered in Syria simply because of the fate of where they were born, and more
children being kidnapped and killed in Africa in the same week. The rage from
9-11 has returned.
What is the difference, I ask you, from the souls who were
murdered at Auschwitz to the children who were slaughtered yesterday? Or from
the innocents who were crushed beyond recognition on 9-11 and the recipient of
the Nobel Peace prize, a child who simply wanted to learn to read and write?
Who speaks for these people if not us? We are a spoiled race that bitches about
gas prices and the color of our President’s skin. Where is our courage as a
nation?
The extreme branches of Islam are today’s Nazis. They have pulled
every nation into a world war of terror. And the only way we were able to stop
the original Nazis was to destroy them.
And so I have come to the conclusion that today’s Nazis must
also be destroyed. Kill them all. I don’t give a rat’s ass about their reasons for
doing what they do; and to hell with their civil rights. They are Nazis. They
destroy innocents who happen to be in the way of their wars. They hate the Jews
simply because they are of a different religion. Hell, they hate other branches
of their own religion! They behead journalists whose only offense is to observe
their terror. They kidnap and rape little girls.
America. It’s time. If we’re going to spend billions waging
limited war, we might as well do the job right. Slaughter those bastards. Out nation’s entire culture changed for
the worse in the 1960s because politicians decided to wage a limited war in
Vietnam that was impossible to win. And as I talk to people today, they are
more frustrated than ever. They have bought the line that it isn’t possible to
stop them all. Yes we can. Yet I hear the echo of those who perished in an
airliner in Pennsylvania as they stopped yet another terror attack on 9-11.
“Let’s roll.”
And while we’re at it, let’s nuke the next Nazis: North
Korea.
“Extremism in the
defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no
virtue.” – 1964 Republican Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater.
(For those who don’t know who Yip Harberg was, he was a
composer. He is responsible for the score of “The Wizard of Oz” as well as the
Great Depression’s iconic “Brother Can You Spare A Dime.” He authored many of
Broadway’s musicals of the 1940s through 1960s and wrote several anti-war songs
of the Vietnam era. )
