A student editorial published Thursday in a university newspaper submits that 13 years of remembrance after the 9/11 attacks by al Qaeda is enough–it’s time for America to “move on” and “get over it.”
Jeremy Rowley, a sophomore at the University of Wyoming, claims:
The way the country has viewed September 11th every year since the attacks has been anything but productive.
He complains specifically of excessive pride and patriotism in his editorial piece that ran in The Branding Iron, the school’s student paper.
Rowley argues that annual patriotic banners, flags and imagery accompanied by “blaring” strains of Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American” do nothing to promote closure for those who lost loved ones during the attack.
“How is this infectious patriotism honoring anybody as it gets shoved down our throats?” he asks, adding:
The fact of the matter is that the way we have dealt with (and no doubt will continue to deal with) a now 13-year-old event does nothing in the way of helping the nation’s people reach closure.
I submit that those who lost loved ones have found their closure. We’re merely honoring their lives and the acts of desperate heroism they performed that day–all toward resolving ourselves that it never happen again.
Then Rowley gets to what I believe is the real purpose of his op-ed–America-bashing. He implies that because “America is not the best country in the world,” perhaps our pride and patriotism is misplaced. As proof of our “failure” as a nation, he makes a not-so-subtle reference to the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Mo.
“We live in a country where unarmed people of color are shot to death without justification,” he wrote.
How does he know the shooting was unjustified? Was he there? Does he have a crystal ball? The same claim was made about the Florida Trayvon Martin shooting before the jury found the defendant, George Zimmerman, not guilty. Finally, “unarmed people” of all races have been shot–sometimes unjustified.
He follows up by referring to the “war on women,” and claims the “country still struggles with paying women a fair wage.”
The fact is, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 was designed to prohibit discriminatory wages. The Obama administration then promoted the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to promote its “war on women,” and was signed into law in 2009. In an effort to keep that phony “war” alive, Democrats introduced the Paycheck Fairness Act of 2014.
This is becoming a broken record.
Rowley finally notes America’s declining education system, stating that “we neglect to give our children an internationally competitive education.”
I submit America’s students are in no position to be “internationally competitive” until they learn to compete amongst themselves.
We live in a society turned soft by awarding every child a trophy for participating, every student a diploma for attending, and punishing sports teams for playing too well.
Rowley closes by stating that improving ourselves is a better way of honoring the dead.
We’re perfectly capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time–we can both honor and strive for perfection. But first and foremost, we must never forget.
As I stated at the beginning, Rowley is a university sophomore. The literal meaning of “sophomore” is a “wise fool,” that is, a person “who has gained knowledge but hasn’t yet learned, or acquired the skills, to apply it correctly,” according to Answers.Yahoo.com. “He knows enough to sound smart, but not enough to be wise.”
That ‘s a perfect description of Rowley.
(h/t: Campus Reform)
