I came by this elsewhere on the web. It is a long read, but well worth it, a worthy way to observe 9-11.

September 10, 2013
America: Not Shining but Burning
By Daren Jonescu

The human mind naturally protects itself from considerations that would interrupt the appealing flow of everyday life. This fact alone explains the continued unwillingness of many thinking people to wonder aloud whether there is still hope for the survival of the United States of America as founded. Too early to voice such a dire concern, you say? On the contrary, it is far too late.

Through most of her history, America has stood as a unique object of admiration and envy to allies and enemies alike, and the most powerful attractive force of the modern era for men seeking prosperity and practical freedom. She has stood, in that expression adapted from the Sermon on the Mount by John Winthrop, and updated by Ronald Reagan, as a "shining city on a hill."
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More:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/a...l#ixzz2eWK36VGp

From my perspective if we do not do the hard work of recognizing how wrong things in the US have gone, and how they went wrong, we lack to tools to slow down, stop, or turn them around.

Some choice insights from Daren Jonescu:

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The human mind naturally protects itself from considerations that would interrupt the appealing flow of everyday life. This fact alone explains the continued unwillingness of many thinking people to wonder aloud whether there is still hope for the survival of the United States of America as founded. Too early to voice such a dire concern, you say? On the contrary, it is far too late.

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Perhaps saving America "from herself" is an inapt description of the crisis. For one might say that America does not need saving from Americans, but rather from an enemy that, while certainly within, cannot properly be called American at all.

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Who more genuinely lives and defends the principles I identified as the Idea of America -- Tocqueville, who warned of the threat of "soft despotism," or the generations of leading American thinkers and politicians who have converted his grave warning into a how-to manual?

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" I feel much the same way. I don't feel dour although I do feel that the US as we knew it is no more.
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Today, 111 years after Theodore Roosevelt began this journey the progressives have finally taken over. We no longer have a government that defends and supports the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Control of both the Republican and Democrat parties belongs to the progressives."

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Over those "111 years," the Idea of America has been undone, or abandoned, mainly through the corruptions of nominal Americans themselves. A compulsory education establishment borrowed from Prussia and completed by Dewey indoctrinates generations in the virtues of submission to the collective, keeping to one's place, and faith in the great god, Government.

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