Here we are again.

Patriot Day, and it's hard to believe it's been 17 years. A child born on 9/11/01 is almost an adult. Everyone in high school and most people in college have no memories of the actual day.

But I do.

Sometimes I feel like a guy who was hanging out in Kepuhi Beach while the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor -- in Hawaii, but not there. I was in Manhattan, but in Midtown. I never got farther south than Canal Street that day. I didn't go downtown to have a look until October. I'll never forget the walled-up blocks around the area, the gray dust that covered everything. I went to the Raccoon Lodge for a drink afterward. It was still hard to believe.

So many Americans have died in the War on Terror -- Wikipedia says just over ten thousand, but we've dealt our enemies death an order of magnitude beyond that. Maybe more. Hard to tell; they lie, and figures are wildly disparate. I wish the number of American deaths had been 0 in this, America's longest shooting war, but if we're going to play numbers games, the Union lost almost a third of that number just at Gettysburg. George W. Bush warned us that this fight was going to take decades, and he wasn't kidding. Norman Podhoretz called it World War IV, World War III being the Cold War (and as he pointed out, that war against Communism did have some hot battles -- Vietnam, Korea, Grenada, etc.). Under his reckoning, World War III lasted more than 40 years, so the War on Terror has a ways to go to tie that.

So much has changed since that day in our culture, in Europe, in Asia, all over. I have to say I think our country's gotten dumber; as our phones got smarter, we got stupider. Certainly ruder, probably crazier. A lot of people nowadays like to play-act at being brave, with what P.J. O'Rourke called "that happy sense of purpose people have when they are standing up for a principle they haven't really been knocked down for yet." Our ruling class has gotten more arrogant, more threatening, but not to those useful nitwits. People who were the salt of the earth in 2001 are suddenly the enemy of all that is good and right. Social media has exploded, and is literally taking casualties. Our media is just as bad as it ever was, so nothing new there. Maybe broker. Dumber. (They "literally know nothing.")

I suppose all of this would have happened anyway, the seeds of our creeping asininity having been planted long ago. Did the war accelerate it, or wake people up who might reverse it? I don't know.

I pray a lot for this country, that its sick culture become well, that it may be worthy of the blood sacrifice of those who fight to defend it. There's just so very little I can do beyond that. Joseph Bottum wrote it that long ago:

We meet our griefs again when work is through.
We do with words what little words can do.