A MESSAGE TO OUR LEADERS

Why should we rebuild the Twin Towers? The very fact that this question has to be asked – and asked after nearly six long years – shows how far we have fallen as a nation and how much our leaders have failed us.

Can one imagine another period in American history when a major American monument, a major symbol of our democracy, could be destroyed in an act of war and not be rebuilt?

It is not the American people who have failed here. They get the message – loud and clear. No, it is our leaders who have let us down – the so–called leadership class, which is made up of the politicians and the media and the NGOs and the think–tank gurus and the top–tier bureaucrats and those academics with inside-the-Beltway influence and the “familiar faces” who shuttle between Wall Street and Washington. They are the ones who have failed us and are continuing to fail us.

The failure to rebuild the Twin Towers is the most glaring symptom of what may prove to be a fatal disease – the increasing unwillingness of our leadership class to think like Americans first and partisans second. What has always saved us as a nation is that in times of great trial, heroes have emerged from both the left and the right to lead us out of danger.

In such times, we Americans, no matter how divided we were on the surface, put aside our differences to fight for what really mattered. And our leaders in both parties did the same. Because they too recognized that we cannot fight to make America better if there is no America to make better in the first place.

Make no mistake: America is seriously, dangerously adrift. There is a feeling out there, among all regions and races and classes, that no one is in charge, that not only is no one captaining our ship of state, there’s no crew left on board either.

There’s a deep suspicion that our leaders are already in the lifeboats, rowing for safer shores. They’ve cut a deal with each other. The deal is this: I won’t tell the American people that you failed to do your duty if you don’t tell them I failed, too.

In the backs of their minds our members of the leadership class know that if everything falls apart here, they’ll be okay. They’ll be okay because they’re no longer really Americans. They’ll be okay because they no longer really care about America, and they can prove it by their failure to act to defend America and the values that have made America what it is: openness; friendliness; religious faith, but also religious tolerance; a willingness in daily life to believe in the basic decency of average human beings, no matter where they come from; the willingness to take a chance – on people, on new ideas, on the future; and a kind of cornball optimism that is very much out of fashion these days with our elites.

Our elites, our leadership class, have become like the elites of any other country with a rocky future. They’ve already planned their escape. And that is why they take so little interest in the issues that really matter to the average American. They can’t. Because they don’t feel them in their gut. They are international in outlook. They are embarrassed to salute the American flag. They don’t tear up when they hear the “Star–Spangled Banner” or “America, the Beautiful”. It’s all too infra dig, too beneath them. What would their friends in London or Paris or Gstaad say? And God forbid we should rebuild the Twin Towers. They were so American, so popular with the people. Horrors!

Our elites have become like the elites everywhere. Because we allowed them to become our elites in the first place.

There was a time – not so long ago – when we could recognize ourselves in our leaders. When you looked at a Tip O’Neill or a Dwight Eisenhower or a Harry Truman, whatever your politics, you trusted those guys to do the right thing. They talked like us and they acted like us and, like us, they knew life’s battles. They had struggled in life and understood our struggles. They knew in their hearts what the American people were feeling and where they wanted to see the country go. They might have argued over how to get there, but they didn’t disagree about the goal.

Does anybody in America really believe we could get leaders like that now? The last five Presidential elections have been won by people who went to Yale. Three of the candidates they beat went to either Harvard or Yale. And in the last two Presidential elections all of the candidates were not only Ivy Leaguers but had been educated at elite East Coast prep schools as well.

Is that the face of America? So should we the American people wonder why we aren’t heard? We aren’t heard because those in power aren’t listening. Worse, they don’t care to listen and they don’t think they need to listen, because they are so cut off from the rest of us they hardly know we exist. They’re cut off from the rest of us because, for all their talk, deep down they don’t believe in democracy.

Deep down, they believe they’re better than the rest of us, above the rest of us. Why? Because the underlying message of their lives is that they’re an elite. Didn’t they go to the best schools, the best colleges? Don’t they take the coolest vacations, live in the coolest places, know the coolest people? What do the concerns of the rest of us matter next to that? Many of them are more familiar with the shops on Bond Street or in the Rue St. Honore than they are with Wal–Mart or Main Street.

But deep down, they also know that things are falling apart. If they care at all, they no longer know how to put things back together again. Or want to make way for those who might know how. They’d rather just fight over minutiae, over the things that don’t really matter, where they might eke out some tiny partisan victory, rather than face the really tough tests of leadership, which require vision and courage and forbearance and wisdom – qualities they conspicuously lack.

The failure to rebuild the Twin Towers is the defining symptom of the disease which afflicts us as a country and may kill us as a country. Those who think others will solve the problem are sorely mistaken. WE are the problem, because we have let ourselves lose control of our government and our nation. We have turned our responsibilities as citizens over to an undeserving elite – in BOTH parties.

They are not listening to us because they don’t think we care. But our leaders should beware. Once they finally wake up from their slumber, the American people will be unsparing toward those who have betrayed their trust. They will be unforgiving. And they will be relentless. A terrible housecleaning is coming. It is coming faster than our leaders realize. And it will affect all members of BOTH parties. Because, so far, both parties have failed America.

In the face of an enemy that loathes everything America stands for and leveled two towering symbols of America in order to show their disdain for us, they have failed to defend those symbols by rebuilding them. By their failure, they have failed us as a nation and emboldened our enemies.

History records no more terrible sin than this: that in time of peril, a country’s leaders knew the right thing to do, but refused do it.