Steve Skojec

Seven years ago this morning, I was awakened by one of my housemates, who told me “We’re under attack! New York is being bombed!” As I groggily looked up at him, standing there in his underwear shouting at me, I thought it was a joke.

It was a bright, sunny morning in Phoenix, Arizona, where I lived in an apartment with friends I had just graduated with from Franciscan University. I stumbled into the living room, rubbing the sleep from my eyes (two hours behind New York time, it was a few minutes before 7AM.)

I saw the smoke and flames billowing out of the north tower of the World Trade Center, but at the time there was no footage of the initial crash - that would surface later, from home video recorded by New Yorkers. As I began to wake up, and process what was being said, I watched the second plane hit on live television. Immediately, any possibility that this was an accident erased from my mind.

As that day wore on, reports about the Pentagon, Flight 93, and more suspected targets came rolling in. It was surreal, sitting there and watching events unfold. I had just quit my job at the phone company and was looking for something different, but I called Jamie, one of my coworkers there (the same Jamie who would later become my wife) to see if she knew what was going on. She told me they were evacuating everyone from the Qwest building, and it didn’t seem she would be working that day either. I called my brother, who was in Austria at Steubenville’s European campus, and they all knew about it too. It seemed that the world was watching, wondering, trying to figure out why.

I remember feeling guilty, because the suspense was thrilling. Watching the coverage of the day, waiting to hear of another disaster, it was almost…entertaining. It was more engaging than any movie I had ever seen, and the part of my brain that reveled in watching the drama unfold (as it had so often done with Hollywood disaster films) was at war with the part of my brain that recognized the sheer human tragedy.

It was a day that told us a lot about our country, and that struggle to recognize that what I was watching was real, and not something Mass-produced for my enjoyment said a lot about how our media-saturated culture has impacted us as human beings.

It also said a lot about us when, during those dark days, we all turned to God en masse, putting aside the divisive (but nonetheless essential) questions about who we are as a nation, and what values we hold dear. We became “One Nation Under God” for a short time, and during that moment of hope, I thought that perhaps we would set out on a better course than the one we had been on since the 1960s and 70s.

It was, unfortunately, a false hope. Things haven’t gotten better - they’ve gotten worse. We’ve forgotten God again, and we’re dealing with our collective grief as a nation by pursuing a war on an udefinable enemy that of its nature can have no end. We have become aggressive, even imperialistic in our attempt to strike back at this enemy, and we’re committed to an occupation that resulted from a war that never should have begun in the first place. In the mean time, we’ve been told to keep shopping “or the terrorists win”. What kind of a message is that? “Keep on consuming, Americans, keep on worshipping the almighty dollar. Keep ignoring issues like abortion as we wreak our indignance on the world.”

America was attacked, yes, and it was a horrible tragedy perpetrated by evil men who adhere to a religious view that is in direct contention with goodness and truth. But regardless of who perpetrated it, we are the ones who must respond to it, and our response has indicated that nothing in this world, not even this, seems capable of causing us to take a much-needed hard look at ourselves. To see that while this attack cost thousands of innocent lives, we have been attacking ourselves for 35 years at the cost of millions of innocent lives. To see that as a culture,  we undermine the institutions of faith and family a little more with every passing day.  To see that as we continue to gorge on smut and fall at the feet of the markets, we are rapidly losing the ability to be that “shining city on a hill” that Reagan so earnestly talked about in his farewell address. We have become an aggressive, ugly, shallow and vicious people. We look at the world with disdain, and they return the glare. And yet, we alone stand out as perhaps the best, last hope to prevent the total collapse of Western civilization. The fire is out, but the embers have not yet died.

Will we at last rise to the challenge? Will we finally wake up? Will we allow the scales to fall from our eyes and see that we have sold our birthright for a pottage? When will we recognize that without acknowledging the social Kingship of Christ, our nation will perish? God is not mocked, and if He would have spared Sodom and Gomorrah for the sake of the few, it is perhaps only because of the few that our nation has been spared.

Time is running out.

9/11 was not simply a historical event, or the beginning of a new epoch. It was the symptom of the advanced onset of a far deeper disease which has permeated the world, and against which we stand defenseless. This disease is the collapse of the Christian faith, and the culture it inspired, and the nations on which it was founded. If Christ is our light, and without Him we may not have eternal life, how can we honestly believe that without Him our nation can have civic life? When the towers fell, so did our facade. We are a nation of men - sinful men - who only cling to God for as long as is expedient, before diving headlong back into our petty indulgences, forgetting the lesson that we have learned: the wages of sin are death.

I don’t propose to know what will happen, or how it should be effected. These are dark days, and the memorial we honor today should remind us of how much darker they can get. Will we emerge victorious, or will we fall beneath the weight of our own corruption?

Time will tell. Until then, we must pray. I encourage you all, if you have not yet done so, to enthrone your families to the Sacred Heart. Then, together with your family, pray the following prayer:

Renewal of the Consecration of the Family

To be said at night prayers in union with all families in which the Sacred Heart has been enthroned.

Most Sweet Jesus, humbly kneeling at Your feet, we renew the consecration of our family to Your Divine Heart. Be You our King forever! In You we have full and entire confidence. May Your spirit penetrate our thoughts, our desires, our words, and our works. Bless our undertakings, share in our joys, in our trials and our labors. Grant us to know You better, to love You more, to serve You without faltering.

By the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Queen of Peace, set up Your kingdom in our country. Enter closely into the midst of our families and make them Yours through the solemn enthronement of Your Sacred Heart, so that soon one cry may resound from home to home: “May the triumphant Heart of Jesus be everywhere loved, blessed, and glorified forever!” Honor and glory to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary!

Sacred Heart of Jesus, protect our families.

Things aren’t looking so great in California’s long-term forecast right now.

Not that sticking something in a comment box or posting my thoughts on a blog make any difference in the real world, but participating in abstract exercises always seems to make me feel better somehow.

I have a reputation for being highly proficient at putting my finger on problems and promptly offering nothing worthwhile in terms of solutions. This is not a valuable characteristic. When I was challenged on this recently in a particularly long comment thread, I decided I’d might as well take a crack at some answers. Sure, they might be wrong, but I at least needed to offer something. After pointing out quite a large swath of things that I believed were wrong with America right now that desperately needed fixing (see my cranky post about Iraq, et. al.,) I offered a few ideas on what kind of course correction might fix them.

For what it’s worth, here they are:

Though they may have been general, I made some suggestions:

“…we need to start bringing troops home ASAP and begin focusing on domestic defense rather than strategic globalism. We need to reign in spending. We need to rekindle our manufacturing base. We need to shore up our trade deficit. We need to stop printing money and fix the dollar.”

Our foreign policy is ill-suited to the modern world. We are dealing with asymmetrical threats. We can’t support the old strategy anymore because the economic base has changed. China and India are the fastest growing economies in the world (and I’ve read Vietnam is getting up there too). What we’ve known for so long is no longer what we know today.

An America that more closely resembles what the founding fathers had in mind - free trade without foreign entanglements - would be a much better America.

Globalization makes things cheaper in the short run, but it’s killing us in the long run. It’s not only an economic threat as our currency continues to devalue in relation to the rest of the world, but it’s a national security threat. Think of the power China has over us if they shut down exports to the U.S. (If you don’t think that’s going happen when they finally call our Taiwan bluff, think again - they’re becoming increasingly self sufficient and are establishing economic ties with other countries like those in Africa.)

We need troops on our own borders. We need to get illegal immigration under control. We’ve got to figure out why we have over 2 million souls in our prison system - roughly an equivalent number to the entire Chinese military.

We need food that comes from nearby, not thousands of miles away, so that when there are problems with things like fuel costs and truckers go out of business, people can still eat. We need to remember how to manufacture our own stuff, so that we aren’t as dependent on Asia for goods as we are dependent on the Middle East for Oil.

We need to get off the oil drug. Alternative energy needs its own manhattan project. Tax breaks should be given - big ones - for people willing to invest in new technologies and transportation forms. Tax breaks should also be given to companies that encourage and meet telecommuting quotas (90% of what I do at work could be done from my home PC, and I commute 4 hours a day to do it.) How much do you think that would reduce oil dependence?

We need the best and brightest minds developing strategies and solutions that put America first, so we can seal up this debt problem, start paying things down, balance our books, defend our borders, regain our technological leadership, and get the world to cool down a bit about how we’re always interfering in their internal affairs.

You’d swear that the patriotic Americans who foam at the mouth at the idea of someone breaching our national sovereignty think that we’re entirely justified in sticking the end of our M16s in every country that looks at another country funny.

Shut down NATO. Shut down NAFTA. How about kicking out the UN, too?

Some of this is radical, of course, and some of it isn’t. But radical change is required, and it needs to be implemented by smarter people than those of us who spend half our days in comment boxes.

So what do you think? Is there merit in any of this? I sincerely believe that we are trying to apply cold war paradigms to a totally changed world. The centers of power are shifting, and America is no longer at the center of the world. Wars used to fix our economy, now they deepen the problems. We have made ourselves entirely too vulnerable through globalism (both economically and militarily) and I think it’s time we got our own house in order.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about these issues (and whatever else you want to bring to the table). Then we can build a fort and pretend we can implement our best ideas. (No girls allowed, of course. And the last one in needs to bring the cookies.)