At the end of his recollections about escaping from the 81st floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower on 9/11, David Paventi spoke of the strong sense of patriotism in the days following the attacks:
“There was a really strong feeling of patriotism. People had flags hanging off their houses that you normally wouldn’t see flags hanging off their houses.”
Many of us have our own recollections of similar displays of patriotism in the days and weeks following 9/11, which even extended to great expressions of solidarity with America from around the world. Mr. Paventi continued by expressing sadness that it would take such a tragic event for Americans to appreciate the levels of freedom they enjoyed prior to 9/11:
“It’s sad to me that it takes an event like that for people to recognize the level of freedom that we enjoy in this country and then to think about some of those freedoms that have been taken away in response to everything that happened.”
Yes, in varying degrees, we tend to take for granted the good things that we have. This is part of the human condition, and it seems that we never have to wait too long before God sends us some reminder that we have settled into thinking that those things we value most could be far more fragile than they seem. The world saw this with the Covid-19 pandemic, and many Traditional Catholics have experienced it with Francis’s Traditionis Custodes.
On the morning of the 23rd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, ABC News published an article about how the two presidential candidates commemorated the tragic event:
“Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump shook hands again Wednesday morning as they arrived at the 9/11 anniversary ceremony in downtown Manhattan. . . The greeting came less than 12 hours after Harris and Trump met for the first time at a presidential debate in Philadelphia, hosted by ABC News.”
While it is true that ABC News hosted the debate, it would be far more accurate to say that ABC News participated in the debate, joining Kamala Harris in an effort to mislead undecided voters about President Trump. As has been the case ever since he entered the presidential race to oppose Hillary Clinton in 2016, one of the most compelling arguments in favor of Trump remains the staggering reality that he is opposed by both the corrupt media and essentially all of the worst political villains involved in running our nation. This was on full display during the debate.
In varying degrees, we tend to take for granted the good things that we have. This is part of the human condition, and it seems that we never have to wait too long before God sends us some reminder that we have settled into thinking that those things we value most could be far more fragile than they seem. The world saw this with the Covid-19 pandemic, and many Traditional Catholics have experienced it with Francis’s Traditionis Custodes.
We did not learn much from Tuesday’s debate, but it was a perfect showcase for how dishonest and vile Harris would be as president. We already knew that she would be the most anti-Christian, pro-abortion, pro-transgender president in history — but those who managed to stomach the debate got a glimpse of how she would try to crush us. By every indication, no dishonesty would be off limits in her work to crush Christians. And with the media covering up the lies, the majority of Americans would likely choose their bread and circuses over trying to stand up for truth and goodness.
Our decisions about how we vote in the election would be very different if the question posed to us was whether we want either of the candidates to be president. Many of us could probably say “no, we would like another person to be president.” But the actual question posed to us is really quite different, even though it sounds similar: “which of these two candidates would you rather have in charge of the country?” Sure, we can tell ourselves and others that we will not be baited into choosing between two candidates that both fall short of what we want, but after the election one of these two candidates will be declared the next president of the United States. When that happens, we will be faced with the reality that one of them is the president.
So we would likely need to make some difficult decisions if Harris is elected. Will she censor, or even criminalize, opposition to the anti-Christian, woke, and globalist agendas? Will she make us choose between enjoying the freedoms we cherish now and keeping our employment and families? Will she and her DOJ eventually determine that Traditional Catholics and pro-life supporters are domestic terrorists who should be treated as such? We do not know, and anyone who pretends that “everything will be fine” is gaslighting.
Thus, going back to Mr. Palenti’s reflection on the role of 9/11 in reminding Americans of the freedoms they had taken for granted, it certainly seems possible that we will experience a similar reckoning with reality if Kamala is declared the winner of the November election. And, unlike 9/11, Covid, and Traditionis Custodes, our loss of freedoms following a Harris win would be self-imposed, given the fact that every rational voter should know with certainty that she would be a vicious anti-Christian tyrant. When Mr. Paventi went to work on 9/11, he did not know that the plane would strike his building, and he could have done nothing to prevent it. That is not our situation. We know what Kamala will be and, at least as a theoretical possibility, the purpose of the election is to decide if that is what we want for our nation.
So how did Mr. Paventi and others get out of the World Trade Center North Tower on 9/11? They started by climbing down the stairs to the lobby, something most of them would not ordinarily do from the 81st floor:
“Eventually, they made it to the lobby of the building, which Paventi described as a scene from ‘Die Hard,’ with large windows that had been blown out and debris everywhere.”
Once in the lobby, they did not go out the revolving doors: as he described it, they walked out through an opening where a window had been before it blew out. On any other day, Mr. Paventi would not have exited the building in that way, but apparently he had no better choice on 9/11. Because he wanted to survive, he had to make the best of the rapidly changing realties of the day.
That is often the nature of life-changing events: they force us to choose between two options that we would never have chosen before everything changed. Our choice in the election is different. We are not asked how we would reshape our lives (for the worse) to deal with a tragedy, we are being asked with this election if we are willing to take the steps now to avoid the tragedy. Trump may not be our preferred candidate, but in God’s providence he offers us the only plausible escape path from the anti-Christian horrors that would bring down God’s wrath on us all. May God have mercy on us and guide us. Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us!
