For my parents' generation, the question every single one of them can answer is where they were when they found out John F. Kennedy was assassinated. A generation before that, the major event was Pearl Harbor.

For my generation, the question every single one of us can answer is where we were when we found out that the World Trade Center and Pentagon had been attacked.

Amy and I were on vacation in the North Georgia mountains, at a bed and breakfast not far from Ellijay. Amy was pregnant with our first child, due in January. This was to be our last little vacation as a married couple with no kids.

We had gotten up about 8 or 8:15 in the morning to get ready to go to breakfast downstairs. There were about two TV channels available in our room, so while Amy was finishing up I was watching the Today show on NBC.

They suddenly interrupted whatever was going on - not surprising that I completely don't remember what they were originally talking about - and showed a shot of the smoke coming out of the north tower. They soon talked about a small plane hitting the tower. Amy came over and we watched as they tried to speculate about what had happened.

Then we, like so many other millions, saw the plane strike the south tower, live on TV. Everyone who saw that live on TV knew immediately: this was no accident. This was intentional. And this was huge.

We were glued to the TV for what seemed like hours. I remember at some point we went downstairs to eat breakfast, primarily motivated by the fact that Amy was pregnant and that the kitchen closed at 10am.

But we saw both towers collapse live on TV as well.

It was a shock to us, knowing that our child would be born, in a matter of months, into a world very different from the one we expected.

I honestly feel that many people have forced themselves to forget the feelings they felt that day - that we were under attack, that this was war, and that this was something our generation would have to rise up against if we were to have any hope of our children living in a free society.

Two movies were released in theaters this year that help to remind us of the human side of this attack and destruction. The first was United 93, which told the story of the passengers who stopped terrorists from flying a fourth plane into an additional high-profile target, either the capitol or the white house. The second was Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, about two New York Port Authority officers who were rescued from the rubble of the collapse.

Discovery Channel ran a new two-hour documentary Saturday, with re-enactments, called Inside the Twin Towers. It tells the story of several people inside both buildings, some who survived and some who did not.

I believe these movies, and documentaries, are an important thing for us to experience. They help us see the event from different angles. You better understand the scope. You better understand the nature of those who desire nothing more than to kill us.

I personally find it difficult to understand how anyone cannot support positions that allow the government to locate, apprehend, and detain the sorts of people that would zealously pursue similar attacks in the future. By this, I mean the types of opposition we see towards a program to monitor calls between people inside the US with suspected terrorists abroad (the NSA surveillance program, which its critics misleadingly refer to as a "domestic spying program"), attempts to analyze mass logs of calling data, holding enemy combatants in military prisons, intense interrogations of known terrorists, and even deposing leaders who are known, active supporters of terrorism.

Any American who would have opposed such measures in the days that followed September 11, 2001 would have been completely ignored. Yet now, five years later, opposition to these policies are popular, and even required in some political parties, if one has any hope of becoming that party's nominee for president.

The question for our generation, as it was in the 1940's, is not whether or not we will experience war. The question is how we will experience war. We could have concentrated on Japan in World War II, only to find ourselves with the Nazis on our doorstep when we had our attention turned somewhere else. Should we have waited for Hitler to attack us first? Or was the fact that he had attacked our good friends and allies not reason enough?

I agree with President Bush that the only way do defeat this enemy is with liberty. Not only freedom here at home, but liberty across the globe. To the degree that America has exported and protected liberty around the world in the past sixty years - from turning Japan from a suicidal empire to a productive and innovative economic powerhouse, to protecting western Europe from Nazi domination, to aiding eastern Europe in their escape from Soviet domination, to providing Iraqi and Afghan citizens the opportunity to form their own freely elected democratic societies - the world is a better place.

Pearl Harbor inspired our grandparents' generation to defeat the evil in their time. The assassination of John F. Kennedy inspired our parents' generation to remain steadfast against Soviet oppression. We have an enemy that has risen up to challenge our generation. The question is, will we have the courage to defeat this enemy? Will the attacks of September 11, 2001, inspire us to defeat our enemy?

Labels: politics