"You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard." Leonard Pitts, Jr. wrote those epithets in the aftermath of 9/11/2001. He directed his venom toward Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Today, this blog directs the same venom ("You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard.") at each Dumbo/Teabagger seeking and praying for the demise of the POTUS 44 — the fate of the nation be damned. Patrick Henry implied in 1765 (a decade before the "Shot Heard 'Round The World") that George III should come to violent end. This blogger wishes the fate of Osama bin Laden upon every Dumbo/Teabagger/Racist/Bigot in our midst. If this is (fair & balanced) treason, make the most of it.
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[1] Leonard Pitts, Jr. after September 11, 2001
[2] Leonard Pitts, Jr. after September 11, 2011
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From Here We’ll Go Forward
Leonard Pitts, Jr.
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It’s my job to have something to say.
They pay me to tease shades of meaning from social and cultural issues, to provide words that help make sense of that which troubles the American soul. But in this moment of airless shock when hot tears sting disbelieving eyes, the only thing I can find to say, the only words that seem to fit, must be addressed to the unknown author of this suffering.
You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard.
What lesson did you hope to teach us by your coward’s attack on our World Trade Center, our Pentagon, us? What was it you hoped we would learn? Whatever it was, please know that you failed.
Did you want us to respect your cause? You just damned your cause.
Did you want to make us fear? You just steeled our resolve.
Did you want to tear us apart? You just brought us together.
Let me tell you about my people. We are a vast and quarrelsome family, a family rent by racial, cultural, political and class division, but a family nonetheless. We’re frivolous, yes, capable of expending tremendous emotional energy on pop cultural minutiae: a singer’s revealing dress, a ball team’s misfortune, a cartoon mouse.
We’re wealthy, too, spoiled by the ready availability of trinkets and material goods; and maybe because of that, we walk through life with a certain sense of blithe entitlement. We are fundamentally decent, though — peace-loving and compassionate. We struggle to know the right thing and to do it. And we are — the overwhelming majority of us — people of faith, believers in a just and loving God.
Some people — you, perhaps — think that any or all of this makes us weak. You’re mistaken. We are not weak. Indeed, we are strong in ways that cannot be measured by arsenals.
Yes, we’re in pain now. We are in mourning, and we are in shock. We’re still grappling with the unreality of the awful thing you did, still working to make ourselves understand that this isn’t a special effect from some Hollywood blockbuster, isn’t the plot development from a Tom Clancy novel.
Both in terms of the awful scope of its ambition and the probable final death toll, your attacks are likely to go down as the worst acts of terrorism in the history of the United States and, indeed, the history of the world. You’ve bloodied us as we have never been bloodied before.
But there’s a gulf of difference between making us bloody and making us fall. This is the lesson that Japan was taught to its bitter sorrow the last time anyone hit us this hard, the last time anyone brought us such abrupt and monumental pain. When roused, we are righteous in our outrage, terrible in our force. When provoked by this level of barbarism, we will bear any suffering, pay any cost, go to any length in the pursuit of justice.
I tell you this without fear of contradiction. I know my people as you, I think, do not. What I know reassures me. It also causes me to tremble with dread of the future.
In days to come, there will be recrimination and accusation, fingers pointing to determine whose failure allowed this to happen and what can be done to prevent it from happening again. There will be heightened security, misguided talk of revoking basic freedoms. We’ll go forward from this moment sobered, chastened, sad. But determined, too. Unimaginably determined.
You see, there is steel beneath this velvet. That aspect of our character is seldom understood by people who don’t know us well. On this day, the family’s bickering is put on hold. As Americans, we will weep; as Americans, we will mourn; and as Americans, we will rise in defense of all that we cherish.
Still, I keep wondering what it was you hoped to teach us. It occurs to me that maybe you just wanted us to know the depths of your hatred.
If that’s the case, consider the message received. And take this message in exchange: You don’t know my people. You don’t know what we’re about. You don’t know what you just started.
But you’re about to learn. Ω
[Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary in 2004. A former writer for Casey Kasem's radio program "American Top 40," Leonard Pitts, Jr. was hired by the Herald as a pop music critic in 1991. By 1994 he was writing about race and current affairs in his own column. His column was syndicated nationally, and his 1999 book Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood was a bestseller. After the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. on 11 September 2001, Pitts wrote an impassioned column headlined "We'll Go Forward From This Moment" that was widely circulated on the Internet and frequently quoted in the press. In the column, Pitt bluntly expressed his anger, defiance and resolve to an unnamed evil terrorist: "You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard." Pitts attended the University of Southern California and earned a BA in English.]
Copyright © 2001 Miami Herald Media Company
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10 Years After 9/11, Reasons To Be Grateful
By Leonard Pitts, Jr.
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That’s an amazing realization when you remember how it was back then. Calendars still counted off days, our eyes told us this. Clocks still ticked off seconds; intellectually, we knew. But time — I would have sworn this in a court of law — did not move.
I remember, in those awful days of aftermath, asking my colleague, Dave Barry, then the Miami Herald’s humor columnist, if he thought he would ever write jokes again. "For the last week," he told me, "I haven’t even tried to write anything funny, and for a while I thought maybe I never would, or should."
He had it, we all had it, that sense of being stuck, unable to find your way back to the life you had lived before. I wrote 10 columns in a row about the horror I had seen, the planes crashing, the lives lost, the buildings melting, the people covered in dust. Finally, I had to force myself to write a column about something else, had to force myself to care about something that was not terror. That lasted one column. Then I went right back to what was now the norm. I was all terror all the time.
Now, somehow, that moment is a decade past. In measuring the distance, perhaps it is enough to note that today’s college freshman was a third grader then. Thus do the clock and the calendar do their work. Thus do today’s terrors become tomorrow’s memories. Thus does news become history.
And I find myself remembering how I used to torture ants as a child, the happy hours I spent flooding their nests with water, watching them grab their larvae and run for safety. The thing that struck me, that earned my childish wonder and respect, was that they always came back. Destroy their world a hundred times, they would build it a hundred and one.
There is something of that in human beings. Indeed, it may be some of the best of what is in us. Call it stubbornness, call it resilience, call it faith, but we always defy the random cruelties of life, always dig ourselves out, bury our dead, mourn our losses, rebuild, find a way to move forward. We did it when fire burned down Chicago, when earthquake leveled San Francisco, when broken levees drowned New Orleans.
And we did it when terror astonished and devastated us on Sept. 11, 2001.
Granted, we emerged from that crucible changed in ominous ways. We find ourselves at war on three fronts, government more secretive and invasive than it has been in years. We are running a prison beyond the reach of habeas corpus on the island of Cuba. The government may not let you fly and will not tell you why.
Yes, Osama bin Laden is dead, and experts tell us the terror group he led is weakened and may soon follow. But terrorism itself remains alive and well, as does a fervent bigotry against Muslims that has seeped into the mainstream of American political thought where it exhibits itself with a shamelessness that once would have been unthinkable.
So there is reason to be concerned at the place to which we have moved. But, having felt stuck inside a nightmare, I know there is also reason to be grateful we moved at all, that clock and calendar did their work and that there resides in us the stubborn resilience of ants.
It felt as if we might never go forward from that moment. But we did. Ω
[Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary in 2004. A former writer for Casey Kasem's radio program "American Top 40," Leonard Pitts, Jr. was hired by the Herald as a pop music critic in 1991. By 1994 he was writing about race and current affairs in his own column. His column was syndicated nationally, and his 1999 book Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood was a bestseller. After the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. on 11 September 2001, Pitts wrote an impassioned column headlined "We'll Go Forward From This Moment" that was widely circulated on the Internet and frequently quoted in the press. In the column, Pitt bluntly expressed his anger, defiance and resolve to an unnamed evil terrorist: "You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard." Pitts attended the University of Southern California and earned a BA in English.]
Copyright © 2011 Miami Herald Media Company
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Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves by Neil Sapper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at sapper.blogspot.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.
Copyright © 2011 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
