Dear Editors,

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The editorial published by the Beacon last week on the anniversary of the September 11th terror attacks is dismissively myopic, poorly written, and historically clueless. In the nearly 10 years that I’ve been familiar with our school’s newspaper, I simply cannot recall a more repulsive display of entitlement and ignorance.

 

There is a proper time to discuss and critique the American response to the 9/11 attacks, but the anniversary is not it. That date will always be a time to mourn our lost countrymen, give thanks that we are lucky enough to live a nation of heroes, and reflect on the epochal shift that occurred over the span of just a few hours on a Tuesday morning in September. It is incomprehensible that the combined educations of the entire editorial staff could not come together to form a single intelligible thing to say about the historical impact of the worst terror attack in the history of the world.

 

It’s unimaginably offensive to claim that the Bush Administration “was able to use the September 11 attack to launch the War on Terror.” Language has meaning, and to choose those words is to accuse the President of the United States of looking for an excuse to launch a war that would cost thousands of American lives. I have many issues with the administration of George W., and I lived the GWOT when I deployed to Afghanistan, but to imply that he wanted this war is disgusting beyond words.

 

The editorial board again showed its collective ignorance when it wrote “The thing that caused 9/11 is not a specific thing that can be beat because it is an anti-American ideology. Ideologies cannot be “beat”.” Leaving aside the fact that an editorial board doesn’t know punctuation goes inside quotation marks, it is completely fallacious to claim that an ideology can’t be defeated. Ideologies can be defeated in many ways. You can provide a better ideology, showing people who are sympathetic militant political Islam the error of their ways. This tactic includes things like humanitarian relief and building infrastructure and schools. However, once someone moves beyond mere sympathy and into hostile action, the proper and just response is to destroy them with any means at our disposal. I cannot imagine what sort of sheltered upbringing could produce such milquetoast attitudes in an age of global terrorism.

 

They attempt to use their relative youth to avoid their responsibility to understand the gravity of the attacks, writing: “the majority of us have little to no memories of that day.” There are volunteers serving overseas right now who were no more than toddlers when the towers fell, so their age offers no excuse.

 

Even by the tenuous standards of a student publication, this article was unacceptably rife with errors both grammatical and stylistic. The sloppy execution leads me to the disturbing conclusion that this was not a carefully considered or well thought out set of ideas, but instead a rushed attempt to publish something that would elicit comment and controversy.

 

If this was a misguided attempt to be edgy or start a conversation, the editorial board should immediately issue an apology and retraction, begging forgiveness from the thousands of families who live every day with the permanent pain of a loved one torn away by the senseless violence of political Islam. If the editors truly believe in the repugnant sentiments they chose to put to page, they should resign and spend the rest of their allegedly adult lives educating themselves about the motivations that led to the most horrific mass murder in US history. Hopefully, they will eventually realize their attempt at moral equivocation and desire to “move on” is a slap in the face to every New York firefighter, Pentagon official, and Flight 93 hero. Unfortunately, that sort of introspection would require at least some sense of shame, which is clearly not to be found in the Beacon newsroom.

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Sincerely,

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Michael O. Wehrer

Erie, PA