To those people, those preening “free thinkers” and earnest, self-congratulatory “humanitarians,” one can only ask if there is any limit to their smug, mindless detachment from the life of their country, and from the natural feelings of their fellow men.
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If you cannot feel patriotism now, then you can never feel patriotism.
If you are disgusted by the flag now, then you should never hold one.
And if you do not feel a burning desire to visit a terrible justice on those responsible—not just on the foot soldiers, but on the men whose words made such an act thinkable, and whose power made it possible—well, then you do not believe in justice at all.
Ross G. Douthat ’02 is a history and literature concentrator in Quincy House.