My Fellow Compassionate Capitalists:
Everyone old enough remembers exactly what they were doing on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001.
If all of our mornings did not start out the same way…. we all ended our evening the same way.
Shock and disbelief that for the first time since the Civil War…enemy combatants had breached the geographical barriers of the continental United States.
What we were experiencing was the audacity of terrorists breaking into OUR HOME!!!!! They were violating the sanctity of the collective conscience of what it meant to be an American!
I watched the towers go down in Cindy’s Café in Mesa, Arizona.
Cindy’s was my favorite “special“ place to eat. I was getting ready to attend a mandatory mobile home park managers meeting. I have since tried to go back to Cindy’s a couple of times. However nothing tasted the same ever again.
It wasn’t the fact that we were under attack by terrorists who hated America and everything it stands for. It wasn’t the fact that government buildings and international monuments dedicated to finance had been targeted. No…. things have never tasted the same because of something I saw that today’s political correctness has almost successfully scrubbed from the Internet and erased from history.
I…..like many others….saw people jumping from the top floors of the Towers. These were not acts of cowardice. These were the final acts of defiance. These were people who would not allow terrorists the satisfaction of taking their lives. These were people who were going to go out on their own terms even though they had no control over the conditions that had brought them to the windows edge.
These were patriots.
These were the very definition of what it means to be ………an American.
Having been the first time in anyone’s generation who was living…we responded to this INTERNAL threat the best way we knew how. We responded with our military might. We rallied together behind each other and our military and our first responders. We spent an unprecedented amount of money on homeland security. We would never be able to walk through domestic airports or drive over major bridges and dams the same way we had before ever again.
By doing this we unintentionally exposed our Achilles’ heel. We advertised to the world that the quickest and easiest way to bankrupt America… was simply to scare us. Isn’t it interesting how in today’s society we have gotten to a point to where civil conversation and actions aren’t even an option. Where posers scream the loudest in hopes that no one will ever call them out. A society of reverse bullying… where standing for something is no longer en vogue. By not standing for something we fall for everything and then wonder why there is no reasonable societal order. A society where a government dictorializes every aspect of our life because we seem to be so eager to give up our liberties in order to have a false sense of security.
A society that scrubs all images of American defiance! A society that does not want to remember THE FALLING MAN.
Two decades of this type of mental and financial deterioration…….prepared us to succumb to a pandemic whose economic and mental ramifications have put us into the current housing crisis.
A crisis that threatens to re-define……if not eliminate the American dream.
My fellow Compassionate Capitalists! We must bring defiance back! We must honor not only the “falling man” but ALL of those who have fallen protecting what has always inherently been ours. We must bring back financial education and the entrepreneurial spirit. We must teach people that there is a difference between taking a calculated risk… and being a gambler! We must bring back pride in America. We must never forget those who sacrificed so that we could have a future. We must honor our history. Yes perfection is never found in the past. However progress is only found by measuring where we are now and where HOPE takes us in the future.
We must use the most powerful force in our arsenal… our finances……. and participation in the economy.
We must NEVER forget!
WE MUST NEVER FEAR!!!!
We must have our last act of defiance be for us to “NEVER awake from the American Dream”!!
