Edd's Gatherin' Place

David and Kristin Ezquerra, front right, hold their candles together as they listen to prayers and songs during a candlelight vigil in memory of terrorist attacks victims in Florence, S.C., Saturday, Sept. 15, 2001. (AP Photo/Morning News, James Nedock)

I hope that you will forgive me the extreme lateness before posting this picture of my daughter and her husband in Florence, South Carolina, only four days after the tragedy of 9/11. My daughter found it one day recently as she was surfing the internet for information on that terrible day a Dantesque (imagine the poet Dante’s visceral image of Hell) nightmare. We marveled at it when we saw it in the Florence Morning News the next morning but back then digital was not in our everyday vocabulary as it is today.

We have sadly become apathetically American certainly not all but many. Our recent election proved, in my mind at least, that slightly less than 50% of our population is irritatingly timid when it comes to the war on terror.

Frankly, this writer doesn’t care; no, taking that back there is care but no one and that means no one inside or outside our borders can we allow to threaten our sovereignty as a nation without a fast and decisive retaliation. History lets us see into the past to that day, December 8, 1941, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his immortal speech:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a day which will live in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

And if it takes 10 years 20 years the fact that we allowed a breach in our sovereignty must be dealt with by an iron fist and not the global impotence of the smart-alecky kid on the international scene, the sodomites out of the United Nations. Also, if you doubt the work our Armed Forces are doing in Iraq, go visit Iraq The Model, selected this year as the Best Non-American Blog.