Monday, September 11, 2006

A Thirteen-Year-Old Sums It Up

As quoted in her father's blog here.

This September 11 will be a quiet one for me. I will spend the morning writing an essay for the journal Policy Review on legislating counterterrorism policy. At noon I have volunteered to teach a class at my daughter's high school, to ten teenage girls on just war theory. We will discuss 9-11. They were in eighth grade when 9-11 took place, my daughter was in third grade, and they spent that morning watching smoke rise from the Pentagon from their school windows atop Mt St Albans, the highest point in Washington DC.

I am curious to know how, or whether, they sense it has affected them. It has had an effect on my own daughter. Of course things are changeable, especially for the child of a conservative father and liberal mother, but when I asked her why she, practically alone among her Upper Northwest DC limousine liberal classmates and teachers, was willing to call herself a conservative, her answer was unhesitating.

"Liberals," she said, presumably referring to her endlessly politically correct private school (the same National Cathedral that hosted ex-president Khatami last week), "always want to tell you what to do and what to think, but then they don't even keep you safe."

Democratic Party politicians might want to reflect on that awhile. They think of themselves as defenders of freedom, protectors of civil liberties. To my daughter, however, they are merely authoritarians who tell you what to think, but then, when push comes to shove, these liberal authoritarians don't even protect you from existential risk...


More good stuff follows.

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