Editorial

A fight for civilization

We are at war.

We have seen our homeland assailed and thousands of our citizens slaughtered, deliberately targeted in their innocence and security.

This was more than an attack on the United States. This was an assault on Western Civilization by militants who hate everything we are and are willing to sacrifice themselves to destroy us.

How we respond will determine whether our civilization endures in a form that we recognize.

For too long we have borne attacks on our shield, deflecting the blows away from our heart. Now we must bare the sword. We cannot co-exist with fundamentalists of the ilk of Afghanistan's Taliban. We must eliminate the threat.

That will be no easy task. It may take a long time. More Americans will die. Our enemy will strike again, until he is incapacitated.

Americans like quick solutions and happy endings. We're not going to get either. We have to be prepared for a long, brutal campaign with ambiguous results.

Through this campaign and beyond, we must guard against sacrificing the values that make our civilization worth defending.

We represent the value of the individual against an enemy who sees the individual as nothing. We represent freedom and tolerance against an enemy who equates freedom with decadence and tolerance with heresy.

We can all join in the fight. We may not be the warriors who name our enemy, who track him to his lair and go in after him with overwhelming force. But we are all guardians of what is best in our country and our civilization.

We must guard our civil liberties against the impulse to trade freedom for security. We must honor our neighbor's faith and his way of life, even though it is different from our own.

We can again take pride in our form of government, recognizing how fortunate we are that Americans affect change by idea, word and law --not at gunpoint.

By upholding our civilization, we are -- all of us -- fighting to save it.

J.C.