The most horrible terrorist attack in history brought with it a seemingly unanswerable question: Why? And as the dust from the destruction has settled, we are forced to face another, more pressing question: What should we do?
The victims held the answers to both questions.
The World Trade Center was destroyed fundamentally because the attackers hated the activities of the men and women working there. The workers practiced — in highest profile — three defining virtues of the United States: individualism, capitalism, and secularism (i.e., reason). They pursued the happiness of their chosen careers, creating personal wealth by the power of their rational judgment. In essence, they sought to earn a joyful, successful life on Earth. For all of this, they were hated and murdered.
The motive of the murderers was a set of opposite ideals: the duty of total submission to God, the sinfulness of the love of money, and the superiority of faith over reason. Their actions were consistent with their chosen anti-values, and the final results coincided with their ideal goal: the rejection of life on Earth.
So the answer to the first question — Why? — is simple, even if hard to believe. The victims were slaughtered by men who despise personal ambition, material wealth, and the practice of rational judgment.
But if we want to survive, even flourish, in a world that contains many more such killers and their supporters, the most pressing question is: What are we going to do? The heroes of Flight 93 gave us the answer, in word and by example.
We know about passenger Todd Beamer, a 32-year-old businessman, because he called an operator in the final minutes of his life. He and the other passengers, realizing that inaction would pave the way for some horrific disaster, chose to fight back against those who were beyond the reach of reason. We may never know the details of what happened in the final moments aboard Flight 93, but the essentials are obvious. At the end of his conversation, Beamer put down the phone, announced, “Let’s roll!” — and then a troop of voluntary soldiers for the United States of America took up the first battle of this war. They did not act selflessly, as is being said; they fought ruthlessly for the values they cherished. They knew they were defending people like themselves, like those in the World Trade Center, like their families, their friends, and like us. They could not save themselves, but they protected what they could of what they loved: the ideal of achieving a happy life on Earth.
Flight 93 was a microcosm of the situation in which the United States now finds itself. We are threatened by unreasoning haters of life, and we have a choice. We can sit still in fear, or in denial that the situation is lethal — or we can fight ruthlessly, with overwhelming force against our would-be murderers and their supporters, beginning with the illegitimate governments that produce them.
We must grasp that it is our virtues — individualism, capitalism, and secular reason — that these terrorists want to wipe out, and then we should, with moral certainty, conduct a sweeping and devastating war, of retaliation and self-defense, against the governments that facilitate the slaughter of Americans. For the love of life, we must answer the battle call: “Let’s roll!”
