On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I was scared to death. 

In nine days, I would undergo open heart surgery, and the surgeon had told me that I had a 1% chance of death and a 5% chance of a stroke. He thought the odds very good. Me, I thought those odds sucked. I was terrified. 

Perspective is everything. 

That morning I turned on the TV to check the news--I rarely did, but for some reason, on 9/11, I wanted an update. 

My world was turned upside down, and I was thousands of miles away from New York City. 

I was no longer scared for me but for our country. Perspective is everything. My problems were minor and manageable compared to the world's. 

Nine days later, as the ruins of the World Trade Center were still smoking, I was more worried for my country than for myself. 

Michael Barbagallo’s WTC 9-11 Footage depicting the attack on the Second World Trade Center by Flight 175 at 9-03 a.m.
pic.twitter.com/ewY4hre9cm

— AlphaFo𝕏 (@Alphafox78) September 11, 2024

9/11 was the day that changed everything in America. It was the day we awoke from our post-Cold War slumber to realize that there was no "End of History" and were reminded that Satan walks the Earth and stalks all of us. 

In September of that year, Americans did something we hadn't done in decades: we came together to fight a common enemy. Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden personified that enemy, but we all understood that the enemy was a movement much more significant than a few hundred extremists hiding in Afghanistan. 

Millions of Islamists were determined to destroy The West, just as the communists in the Soviet Union had tried before them. Whatever our differences on the issue of defending Western values, we were united. 

Looking back it now seems naive to believe that this unity would survive the coming decades. By 2003, the country was again at war with itself, even if we were fighting over competing visions of what America should do at the time, not about whether America was the bad guy and its critics in the right. 

Fast forward 20 years, and America is unrecognizable, both in good ways and bad. Both the Democrats and Republicans are unrecognizable. Republicans now (rightly) believe that Bush was wrong to invade Iraq, and the left wing of the Democrat Party no longer believe America is the good guy. 

"Resistance is justified!"
"Al Qassam you make us proud!"
"Lion's Den you make us proud!"

(And I missed getting "Yahya Sinwar you make us proud!" in the beginning.) pic.twitter.com/MfqoD02kit

— Yaakov Strasberg (@YaakovStras) September 11, 2024

In fact, the radical wing of the Democrat Party is now marching in the streets, defending the Islamists and calling for the "decolonization" of America and the rest of the world. Leftists even post TikTok videos about Osama bin Laden being right. 

Over the past 24 hours, thousands of TikToks (at least) have been posted where people share how they just read Bin Laden’s infamous "Letter to America," in which he explained why he attacked the United States.

The TikToks are from people of all ages, races, ethnicities, and… pic.twitter.com/EwjiGtFEE3

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) November 16, 2023

Just in case you worry that I believe most or all Democrats feel this way, let me set you straight: they don't. Most Democrats are just trying to live their lives and have a vision of their party based on decades of experience that no longer apply. Even most Democrat elected officials are not radicals; they are just politicians lusting after power, as most politicians do. 

But the left today is like the left during the 60s and 70s--their animating principle is hating America and capitalism, and they have weirdly aligned themselves with Islamists who would gladly slit their throats. 

We look on in horror at the embrace of Islamism by so many of our youth and even academics as we should. 

But we should also remember the lesson of 9/11--when called upon to work together on defending American values, mainstream Democrats and Republicans can still work together. The radicals of today are at the height of their power, but that doesn't mean that we can't reach out to our neighbors to remind them that we still love our common heritage. 

As conservatives, we are duty-bound to warn Americans about the danger, but we are also duty-bound to embrace people whose policy preferences are different than ours but whose belief in the American Dream aligns with ours. Our common enemy is the radical left, even if most Democrats don't yet understand that they are evil. 

It's hard. We suffer the fate of Cassandra often enough, often condemned to warn people of real dangers without being believed until it is too late to avoid the danger. 

This is the task God has given us. It's frustrating, often infuriating, and taxing. 

Yet America's reaction to 9/11 shows that achieving (temporary) unity is possible, just as it reminds us that evil roams the Earth.