This lowly one comes before you and begs permission to make an observation about some horrors in recent American history. But not the reason or ideology behind them. I am bothered by the reactions to them, and how those reactions have changed over time.

After 9/11, the call was for America to stand together, united, as a single people. The operative phrase was that an “attack on one of us is an attack on all of us”. The US flew American flags and stood in apparent solidarity.
The Ft. Hood massacre was declared a “workplace violence” incident, and we were told that members of our Armed Forces were killed by someone who was mentally imbalanced. No mention was made that “an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us”. Some flew American flags, but others questions why our Armed Forces were disarmed while on their own military base.

Then, after the Boston Marathon bombing, we heard about people being “Boston Strong”. The city did its best to help those who were maimed by a bomb (not a gun, btw). It was “an attack on Boston and innocent marathoners” – not an attack on America. Some flew American flags, but others didn’t – and some blamed America for Tsarnaev’s radicalization.

The attack on a medical facility in San Bernardino was blamed on someone who “hated his co-workers” and who had been “radicalized” by his recently-immigrated wife. But again, this was treated as an isolated incident. Few raised American flags and called for solidarity with other Americans. And others voted against a bill in Congress that would have strengthened immigration policy for those from countries where the ID of the immigrant could not be completely verified.

And now, an attack on a bar in Orlando is being called an “attack on the LGBT community”, with calls to raise the “rainbow flag” – not the American flag – as a way to honor those who were killed. This latest attack is not “an attack on all of us”. In fact, the child-king Obama didn’t even call the governor of Florida after the incident to send his sympathies to those who were killed and maimed. He did take the opportunity to blame the guns used in the attack, without mentioning that the guns were obtained legally and after all required background checks had been completed.

My observation is this: as 9/11 becomes more distant and attacks become more frequent, we seem to be drifting away from unity as one people, and toward disunity and isolation by group. I could point to the failure of the child-king Obama to unite the country by naming the philosophy that inspires the attackers. And I could point to the failed diplomatic efforts of She Who Wears Pantsuits, who was apparently more concerned with receiving payoffs from foreign potentates than telling those potentates to “knock it off – NOW”.

The salient fact is that we are not being told, by the President of The United States, that we are a single people who are under attack by a vicious ideology that will murder anyone standing in its way. Instead, we are being told that any reaction to prevent further attacks would “not be who we are” – which apparently means that we are meant to be “sitting ducks”.

This lowly one wonders whether the next attack will be declared as merely another “bump in the road”, a phrase used by the child-king Obama when referring to deaths by violence inspired by Islam (yes, he actually said this back in 2012), a phrase that reveals just how little he respects the lives of “those who slander the prophet of Islam” (yes, he said this too – in front of the UN).

Your Highness, I had often wondered whether the US will survive – intact – to 2050. With these recent incidents, and with this administrations apparent refusal to acknowledge the ideology at the heart of these attacks, I become more convinced that – lacking some major turn from passivity to offense in the “war on terror” – my fears about 2050 are coming true. And possibly sooner than that.