September 11th at the Movies. Too Painful to Remember, or Too Eager to Forget?
By Justin Darr (04/03/06)
Ever have a conversation with someone who does not want to talk to you about the subject at hand? You know the ones: Why are you asking me for money again? When are you going to get around to returning all the tools you barrowed? And, what are your intentions with my daughter?
The worse part about these conversations is not just trying to bring the subject up, but having to sit through someone’s restatement of the facts as you know them, but with a little twist that comes from their peculiar filter on reality: “So, when I said, ‘I need my reciprocating saw by Tuesday,’ you thought I meant, “Go ahead and keep it.’” Or worse, they just stymie you and avoid the entire subject by blaming you for bringing it up in the first place: “How could you ask me to hurry up when I’m busy watching television,” or, “How could you be so insensitive to bring up my years of drinking and womanizing when I am so upset that my wife has left me?”
No matter what the subject or the person involved, people who react this way are just trying to avoid the facts showing they made a mistake, and are now unwilling to admit it.
Well, sorry to tell you, but, if you have been fortunate enough to avoid dealing with people like this, your time in blissful paradise is over because the liberals are yet once again gearing up with another “How can you be so insensitive to tell the truth” campaign.
This time it is going to revolve around the soon to be released movie, “United 93,” from Universal Studios.
What! A movie about 9/11? Yes, after almost 5 years, Hollywood has finally got around to making something about the single largest event in American history since the Civil War. So far, the simple release of the trailer to the movie has elicited cries of outrage and indignation from the left. “Newsweek” reported wails of “too soon!” echoed through Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, and the manager of a theater in New York said that, after viewing the trailer, "One lady was crying… She was saying we shouldn't have [played the trailer]. That this was wrong ... I don't think people are ready for this."
“Too soon” and “not ready for this?” Allow me to translate. Sentiments like these actually mean several things:
1. It is too soon to show a movie accurately depicting the savagery of Muslim extremists and the murderous violence they would gleefully inflict on you, me, your children, or anyone else who has the audacity to disagree with them, before we have an adequate amount of time to find way to blame it on the United States and Israel.
2. Seeing the images of 9/11 makes it far too difficult to call terrorists being interrogated by women wearing tight T-shirts “torture,” and less willing to make the World Trade Center Memorial a multicultural display of injustices through the ages.
3. And, Americans are not ready to remember the horror of 9/11 before a sufficient number of years have past until the left can claim that it never happened.
Within a year of the attacks on Pearl Harbor, movies about the World War II were mainstays of the American box office. Even during height of the War, movies like “The Battle for Midway,” “5 Graves to Cairo,” “The Flying Tigers,” and “Destination Tokyo,” all showed images of sometimes poorly equipped, outnumbered, scared Americans fighting and dying in the War. In 1943, there was even a documentary on the Pearl Harbor attack released called “December 7th,” that won an Academy Award.
So what is the difference between today and the World War II era? In World War II, there where tens of thousands more “Gold Star Mothers” than there are today, where they not horribly offended seeing boys, just like their sons, dying in the trenches? Today, every time we strike a terrorist camp in Iraq and the terrorists who were not killed claim that it was a “wedding party” and no militants, just women and children, were killed, the modern left thinks we should immediately pull out of the country and impeach the President. But, in World War II, tens of thousands of innocent civilians were inadvertently killed in Allied bombing campaigns, but the War effort never wavered. And, Pearl Harbor was a military target that killed far fewer people than the September 11 attacks, but “Remember Pearl Harbor” remains a stirring battle cry to this day while, for some reason, people get upset when we “remind” them about 9/11.
The difference is not that we were less sensitive 60 years ago, but that we are more liberal today.
Decades of liberalization has made our people and both political parties soft to the point that we are more concerned with making friends with our enemies and worried about how their supporters perceive us than we are with protecting ourselves. And now, the left will do anything, including censorship through “outrage” to prevent it.
When you see the images of 9/11, are you upset about what you are seeing, or at what you have allowed yourself to forget?
© April 2006, Justin Darr
Justin Darr is a staff writer for The New Media Alliance, and proud member of the MoveOff Network.
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