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So slow were we to realize how fundamentally different this was than wars we had studied in school or seen in movies that by October we were bargaining against our own values, moving steadily and surely into the jaws of a trap that Al-Qaeda had laid for us.
The top priority of the terrorist—even more important than killing you—is to make himself your top priority. This is why protecting ourselves from terrorist violence is not enough to defeat terrorism, especially if we try to achieve safety in ways that elevate the importance of terrorists and wind up publicizing their causes. We all want to avoid being harmed—but if the cost of doing so is making the terrorist the thing you care about most, to the exclusion of the other things that matter in your society, then you have handed him exactly the kind of victory that makes terrorism such a frequent
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Emblematic of this was the sudden adoption, by administration spokespeople and Fox News anchors, of the bizarre term “homicide bomber” instead of “suicide bomber.” It may have scratched an emotional itch, but the terminology was doubly useless, both belaboring the obvious fact that bombers are generally homicidal, and obscuring the tactically useful distinction between those murderers who are prepared to kill themselves in the process and those who are not.
I listened vaguely as the U.N. Secretary General, Kofi Annan, gave a speech about three simultaneous global crises of security, solidarity, and cultural division. Meanwhile, at William & Mary’s commencement address, Jon Stewart treated the graduates to a cheeky but rueful commentary on the “real world,” on behalf of the generation in charge: “I don’t really know how to put this, so I’ll be blunt. We broke it. . . . But here’s the good news. You fix this thing, you’re the next Greatest Generation, people.”
qualities we would have. This vision of justice is often compared to being asked how you would want a cake to be divided if you did not know which piece will be yours: equally, of course.
The entire campus of the elite prep school Phillips Andover was in uniform throughout World War I, so it was hardly shocking that the outbreak of World War II would motivate a young George Herbert Walker Bush to enlist on his eighteenth birthday and find his own way to the Pacific. A year after Kennedy and the men of PT-109 were rescued from the island where they had washed up, another Navy operation would rescue young Bush out of the waters of Chichijima where he had been shot down during a daring strafing run.
And yet, we allow people with no experience in the military to make decisions about wars and fighting.
The proportion of members of Congress who were veterans had fallen from 70 percent in 1969 to 25 in 2004, and fewer than 2 percent of members of Congress had a child who was serving.
policy and symbolism cannot be decoupled. As a manager, a mayor must focus on what can be measured and proven, difficult decisions, and the use of new and old tools to solve important problems. But as a leader, sometimes the most important thing is simply to show up, or to gather the right people together, to send a certain kind of message. And while the mayor is the chief executive for the city as an administration, it is no less important to be, as the legendary Indianapolis mayor Bill Hudnut once said, “the celebrator, and sometimes the mourner, to the city as community.”
Over time I’ve observed that we are more generous, supportive, and pleasant toward people we actually know than toward those we understand only as categories or groups. Humans can of course be cruel in person, too, but as a general rule we seem less likely to hate from up close.
The outcome was as feared: Roberto was deported to Juárez and the family lost the restaurant. The news cycle moved on. But it’s hard for me to move beyond that singular moment at the restaurant as I prepared to leave, looking into Dimitri’s eyes and trying to think of something to tell him besides “You’ll get your father back” or “Everything will be okay,” which I could not say because I doubted it was true. Here was a kid—a very American kid—who wanted the most natural thing in the world: the company of his own father. And because of politics, he couldn’t have it. A law said that he and his
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“AN ADVENTURE IS ONLY an inconvenience rightly considered,” said my friend and colleague Scott Ford, quoting G. K. Chesterton as he raised a glass of scotch.
Looking back, I see no good reason that can be confected for why one person and not another should die at random on a routine mission. For a mind that can’t come to rest around that question, the only way out is to construct a reason going forward. You resolve to build a life that is somehow worthy of emerging on the better side of luck’s absurd equations, because you know that by definition your luck is something you don’t deserve. Nothing that had happened during the deployment would justify the pattern by which I returned safely and some of the others did not, but I had the rest of my life
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It is easier to be cruel, or unfair, to people in groups and in the abstract; harder to do so toward a specific person in your midst, especially if you know them already. Gays have the benefit of being a minority whose membership is not necessarily obvious when you meet one (or love one). Common decency can kick in before there is time for prejudice to intervene. Of course, humans can be cruel to people we know, too, but not as often—and we’re rarely as proud of it.
Progress could begin only once the loss had been fully metabolized. Nothing is more human than to resist loss, which is why cynical politicians can get pretty far by offering up the fantasy that a loss can be reversed rather than overcome the hard way. This is the deepest lie of our recent national politics, the core falsehood encoded in “Make America Great Again.” Beneath the impossible promises—that coal alone will fuel our future, that a big wall can be built around our status quo, that climate change isn’t even real—is the deeper fantasy that time itself can be reversed, all losses
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On deployment in Kabul, I encountered the Afghan proverb that says, “A river is made drop by drop.” It must have been inspired by the Amu Darya on the Tajikistan border, but of course I pictured instead the St. Joseph, as it coursed by my house in South Bend some seven thousand miles away. It is usually invoked at the outset of a big undertaking that requires countless individual steps. But it also captures the importance of working at the local level as part of building