September 2022 Archives

Last week I received the sad news that Ron Palma, my high school Latin teacher, passed away on Monday, September 19, 2022, at the age of 75. He is survived by Fay, his college sweetheart and wife of 55 years, two daughters, and three grandchildren. His 38-year career at Holland Hall School placed him among the half-dozen longest serving teachers in the school's 100-year history.

Mr. Palma was not my first Latin teacher. I took Latin I in 8th grade, taught by Bill Bippus, who is an Episcopal priest these days, and Ruth Kaiser Nelson filled in for Mr. Bippus during his leave of absence the first semester. Mr. Bippus and Mrs. Nelson were memorable, enjoyable, and excellent teachers and gave me a great foundation in the Latin language. The three years I spent as Mr. Palma's student built in me a love for the language that remains to this day and which I've tried (and succeeded to varying degrees) to pass along to my children. The value I found in Latin learning was part of what led me to find a way to study Latin while a student at MIT, to embrace classical education for my own children and to seek, as a board member of the nascent Tulsa Classical Academy (opening 2023), to make this kind of education available to the wider Tulsa community.

My classmates and I first encountered Ron Palma in Latin II, in 1977, just four years into his 38-year career at Holland Hall School. He was in a doctoral program at the University of Cincinnati, a "Ph.D.A.B.D." (all but dissertation), when he was hired by Holland Hall in 1973. Above, that's his yearbook photo from his very first year of teaching.

Mr. Palma had a hearty and infectious laugh and a great deal of tolerance for the hijinks of high school boys. We called him Magister, merely the Latin word for teacher, but it became a term of endearment long after our time at school. His office during my freshman year was just off of the Barnard Commons (the eastern cluster of offices, first door on the right) and was a favorite hangout. When Mr. Palma's office moved to the mezzanine overlooking the commons, it became a target for excessive decoration, particularly around Christmas time. He was good-natured about the ribbing we gave him for supporting independent candidate John Anderson (10% in the 1980 presidential election).

And we learned Latin and learned to love it. In Latin II we completed our study of grammar; in Latin III we delved into prose and poetry; and in Latin IV we read the first six books of the Aeneid in Latin, following pius Aeneas from the burning ruins of Troy to the palace of Queen Dido of Carthage to the shores of Latium and the future site of Rome. Mr. Palma taught us dactylic hexameter, hendecasyllablic verse, and the rules of vowel quantity and elision, and he had us memorize the first seven lines of the Aeneid (of which I can remember the first two): "Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit...." One assignment involved writing epigrams, after the fashion of Martial; one of mine began, "O Boren bos bifrons...."

The fact that many students continued Latin into years 3 and 4 is a tribute to Mr. Palma's love of the language, his skill as a teacher, and his connection with students.

In addition to classroom duties, during his early Holland Hall career Mr. Palma also served as coach of the cross-country running team, Chess Club sponsor, and faculty advisor to Hallway, the school newspaper.

Shortly after my time at Holland Hall, Ron Palma was co-author of a very popular series of Latin textbooks, Ecce Romani, which teaches the language through a narrative about a Roman family. The series introduces an increasing number of authentic Roman texts as the student progresses. This review has a description of the Ecce Romani approach to Latin instruction.

In 1991, the College Board honored Mr. Palma for instructional excellence as an Advanced Placement Latin teacher, beginning in 1976. At the time of this Special Recognition Award, he estimated that 150 Holland Hall students had taken the AP Latin exam. (I was foolishly not among them, having opted to take a geology class as a senior that I didn't need for graduation instead of AP Latin.)

Mr. Palma loved travel, particularly to lands once part of the Roman empire, and enjoyed photographing the places he visited. I recall a stunning photo of red-tiled roofs against the caerulean Mediterranean sky which won a Tulsa Tribune photography contest.

After retirement in 2011, Palma spent the next three years writing a comprehensive history of Holland Hall School, in two volumes; Holland Hall: Since 1922 was published in 2016 by Grandin Hood, Nashville. It's a sad coincidence that he died just two days short of the centennial of the school he served, celebrated, and loved. I last saw him in April at the memorial service for his HH colleague, Carlos Tuttle.

A memorial service will be held at a later date. It was Mr. Palma's wish that gifts in his memory be made to the Holland Hall scholarship fund.

Third-year Latin is traditionally Caesar and Cicero. We read some of Caesar's Gallic Wars as well as The Millionaire's Dinner Party (Maurice Balme's adaptation for Latin students of the Cena Trimalchionis by Petronius). But in place of Cicero, Mr. Palma substituted the poetry of Catullus. Catullus was a contemporary of Caesar, a well-to-do young man from the provinces who had come to Rome, who lived fast and died young, around the age of 30. Some of Catullus's famous topics include his envy of the attention paid by his girlfriend to her pet sparrow (2) and his lament on the sparrow's death (3), a dinner invitation in which he asks his guest to bring food and drink, because his cupboard is bare (13), an appeal to his lover for thousands of kisses (5: "Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus... da mi basia mille"), a tribute to the boat which carried him home from Bithynia (4), and his joy at returning to his home in Sirmio after a long absence (31). Carmen 85 ("Odi et amo," "I hate and I love") captures in two lines the conflicted emotions of the disappointed suitor. There was a youthful vigor and clarity to Catullus's poetry that appeals to teen-aged Latin scholars in a way that the lengthy and allusive periodic sentences of a Ciceronian speech do not. (Be advised that some of Catullus's poetry, which, I hasten to add, we did not study in Mr. Palma's class, was a bit too vigorous and clear.)

Perhaps the most quoted and beloved Catullus poem is Carmen 101, his lament on arriving after a long journey at the grave of his brother, who died far from home. It seems a fitting way to end this tribute.

Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam adloquerer cinerem,
quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum,
heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi.
nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum
tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.

Through many nations and through many seas borne,
I come, brother, for these sad funeral rites,
that I may give the last gifts to the dead,
and may vainly speak to your silent ashes, since fortune
has taken yourself away from me.
Ah, poor brother, undeservedly snatched from me.
But now receive these gifts, which have been handed down
in the ancient manner of ancestors, the sad gifts to the grave,
drenched with a brother's tears,
and for ever, brother, hail and farewell.

P.S. I would be happy to augment this entry with tributes from students and other friends of Ron Palma. Please email me at blog at batesline dot com.

P.P.S. P.S. stands for post scriptum, which is your actual Latin for "written after." The translation of Catullus 101 is from the 1894 translation by Leonard C. Smithers.

MORE: I reached out to Gilbert Lawall, professor emeritus of Classics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, to ask about Mr. Palma's involvement with Ecce Romani. Prof. Lawall replied:

In addition to being an inspiring and influential teacher of Latin language and literature, Mr. Palma helped Professor Gilbert Lawall of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst revise the Scottish Classics Group's Ecce Romani into an American version. Along with other consultants, Mr. Palma helped Professor Lawall change much of the vocabulary, many pictures, and some of the essays in the Scottish version. Mr. Palma co-authored the 212 page Teacher's Guide for Ecce Romani III with David J. Perry of the Rye Country Day School, Rye, New York.

Mr. Palma frequently contributed articles to the Longman Latin Newsletter and to the Ecce Romani Newsletter, which contained lesson plans, teaching tips, exercises, work sheets, and sample quizzes and exams.

Triste dictu, Prof. Lawall advises that he no longer has copies of the print archive of newsletters that he mentions.

John Byron Kuhner pays tribute to Queen Elizabeth II as an exemplar of pietas -- not piety in the strictly religious sense, but dutifulness, after the fashion of Aeneas, hero of Vergil's Aeneid, the epic journey of the founder of Rome from the ashes of Troy.

It is generally acknowledged that the outpouring of respect and admiration for Elizabeth II we have seen in the past days is the result of what we may call her dutifulness. Her personal feelings, caprices, or desires played a relatively minor role in her public life. She did her duty. Even at the very end, she met with and did the work of installing the new prime minister in person -- not, say, by Zoom -- and did it with a smile on her face, even though she was ninety-six and literally two days away from death. Her ill health was no excuse for her not to serve her country as her role expected....

In fact, the great Roman epic, the Aeneid, might almost have been written as a meditation on the Elizabethan regnal style. In the Greco-Roman tradition, epic heroes get their own specific epithet, a verbal descriptor that captures their essence. There is "godlike Achilles" and "wily Odysseus." Aeneas, the Roman hero, gets the hashtag pius. It can mean "pious," but it's less specifically religious than the English word. It's more like "dutiful" or "responsible." In other words, it's exactly the quality Elizabeth has proven so enduringly relevant to our age.

There is some irony in this relevance. Latin teachers have long labored to make Aeneas seem appealing to teens, who often are forced to read the Aeneid as the crowning effort of their Latin studies. The easiest way, in 2022, would probably be to read it with a biography of Queen Elizabeth in parallel.

After being blown off course, Aeneas lands in Carthage, where he falls in love with the beautiful queen Dido. There is a problem, however: she's not leaving, and he's supposed to go to Italy. He can sail off to found his kingdom, or stay and enjoy her love. Elizabeth experienced this same drama in her own family. Her uncle, King Edward VIII, found himself in love with a woman -- a then-married woman who had already been divorced once -- who could not be compatible with his role as king. Edward abdicated, choosing love....

In the first book of the Aeneid, the fleet Aeneas is leading sails into a storm. Most of the ships are lost or destroyed; a small remnant pulls into a harbor. Aeneas makes a brief speech: this suffering will end, with God's help (dabit deus his quoque finem); do not be afraid (maestum timorem mittite); we have a job to do; toughen up, and hold on for better days (durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis). It's the template for all such speeches. Short and forceful, almost every sentence in it became a motto used by some British house at some point or other.

The real kicker, though, is what comes next. "This is what he says aloud," Vergil says; "sick with worry, he feigns a look of hope, and keeps his grief hidden in his heart" (talia voce refert; curisque ingentibus aeger spem voltu simulat, premit altum corde dolorem). It was all a show, a facade of optimism such as leadership requires, whether the leader feels it or not. This was an entire public relations policy for Elizabeth. She spoke little -- as Aeneas -- never tried to explain anything away or make light of a situation -- as Aeneas -- and kept her tone hopeful. The propaganda posters her father had put up during the war ("courage, cheerfulness, resolution") used this formula. Her speech during the COVID lockdowns just a few years ago was virtually the same speech, with phrases altered to suit the occasion: "We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return. We will be with our friends again. We will be with our families again. We will meet again."

C-SPAN will carry live coverage of Queen Elizabeth's state funeral at Westminster Abbey on Monday, September 19, 2022, beginning at 4:30 AM Tulsa time. C-SPAN also has video of King Charles III's televised address to the nation, his accession ceremony, and his address in Westminster Hall, among other public statements and events related to the Queen's death.

The BBC has posted three and a half hours of footage of the mourners filing past the Queen lying in state at the Palace of Westminster. Future generations may be more fascinated by the way this video captures, as an accidental documentary, the range of dress and carriage of the British subjects who filed past the coffin than by the significance of the event itself. People seem to have dressed as they normally would for going to work or running errands. Some bowed or curtsied, a few crossed themselves, many merely nodded in the direction of the coffin and strode on. Here are the government's directions to those wishing to pay their last respects.

I am struck by the number of backpacks, which is somewhat surprising given security concerns, but not surprising given that these people have been in line for over 8 hours and have walked 4 or 5 miles, not counting whatever walking they did to reach the end of the queue. It is quite normal in London for people to have backpacks and shopping bags with them at a church service or in a museum or historic site. It's not as though you can drop your bags in the trunk of your car or quickly run them back home if you're a commuter.

During my time in England in 2018, I attended a service at Westminster Abbey led by Charles as Prince of Wales in recognition of the contributions of Christians in the Middle East. Those of us sitting in the nave were in chairs facing the center aisle, and we watched the Prince and a number of prominent religious leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Catholicos-Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Archimandrite of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, and the Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, process past us at the start of the service and again at the end. I was in the second row facing the aisle and had a small daypack with me. Someone in the row of chairs on the aisle had a small roll-aboard suitcase under his chair. Everything had been hand-searched outside, before we had been allowed to enter the abbey, and advance tickets were required. I can't imagine anything larger than a small purse to be allowed into a similar service in the US, even with hand-screening.

According to the Department of Digital, Culture, Media, & Sport, as of midnight London time, September 15/16, 2022, the queue for the Queen's lying-in-state stretched for 4.9 miles down the south bank of the Thames, far past the Tower Bridge, and into Southwark Park. They're using YouTube to provide live-streaming updates on the queue's length, queueing time (currently 9 hours), and location of the end of the queue, which is specified to within a 3 meter radius using the What3Words system, currently at navy.noises.overnight, near the Southwark Park tennis courts. Mourners are issued a colored and numbered wristband when joining the queue, making it possible to step away from the line briefly for toilets and refreshments. A bag drop facility on the other side of the Thames is provided for larger bags.

MORE:

Samantha Cohen, a 17-year aide to the Queen, shares her memories of the Queen's sense of humor, her Christmas gifts to her staff, her astounding memory for places she'd visited, and her first sight of the queen when Cohen was a schoolgirl at All Hallows in Brisbane, Australia.

Rod Argent of the 1960s band The Zombies remembers two encounters with Queen Elizabeth, once at the 1957 Maundy Thursday service, when he was a 12-year-old chorister at St. Albans Abbey, and he received Maundy money from the Queen and as a performer at the Queen's 60th birthday celebration at Windsor Castle, in the band for a musical specially composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice:

The queen was lovely, and on great form - the whole audience was simply the whole of the extended Royal Family, plus King Hussein! After the performance they all mingled and shared drinks with us, and Prince Edward introduced me to Her Majesty. The queen then spied bass player John Mole, who was unbelievably shy, actually hiding behind the drum kit......she immediately found her way to him - moving drums aside herself (!) - so she could engage him in a personal conversation. Such a considerate and thoughtful action.

UPDATE: At 10:00 a.m. London time on September 16, estimated queueing time was at least 14 hours, and a few minutes later, it was announced "The queue is at capacity and entry is currently paused. Please do not attempt to join until it resumes. Check back for further updates."

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On BBC Radio 4, Edward Stoughton discusses the faith of Queen Elizabeth II. The sacramental nature of the coronation is discussed, beginning with a quote from Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury of the time: "The coronation service is a solemn act of the church by which the Queen enters into a new relation with her people and with God and therefore becomes in some sense a new person herself."

The program included this quote about the Queen's spiritual heritage from Catherine Butcher, coauthor of The Servant Queen and the King She Serves, the only book for which the Queen wrote a forward:

[The Queen's] maternal grandmother was someone who read the Bible to her children for an hour a day, and then the Queen Mother subscribed to Bible Reading Notes and so was someone who regularly read the Bible herself, and she taught her daughters Bible stories and also prayers from the Scottish Psalter. And the first lesson of every week for the Queen and Princess Margaret was reading Scripture for half an hour every week.

In this interview, Catherine Butcher describes her experience in the queue and some details about the regalia at the Queen's lying-in-state and its significance that you won't have seen anywhere else.

Haven Today has two interviews with Catherine Butcher about Queen Elizabeth's faith in Christ, one from the Platinum Jubilee, and one from shortly after the Queen's death.

The year was 1953. Queen Elizabeth II had already succeeded her father, George VI, upon his death in February the year before. On May 1, almost exactly a month before her coronation, the Queen began praying every day and reading private devotions that were specifically written for her by the Archbishop of Canterbury to help her spiritually prepare to become the figurehead of the United Kingdom.

Butcher's book, Our Faithful Queen, which includes some of the devotions from the Archbishop's book for the Queen, is available through Haven Ministries. Alec Gilmore includes some of the meditations from For The Queen : a little book of private devotions in preparation for Her Majesty's Coronation : to be used from first of May to second of June 1953 in this 2013 Diamond Jubilee article in the Church Times. Haven Ministries also has a collection of 10 Surprising Things the Queen Said About Jesus, mainly from her annual Christmas speech to her subjects around the world, which she wrote herself.

The latest edition of Presbycast discusses the relationship between Presbyterians and the Crown and the Queen's personal faith: The Passing of the Presbyterian Queen.

There is a quote circulating as a meme, purporting to be from Queen Elizabeth II, but it is in fact from Queen Victoria, from the book 'Crowned to serve', a coronation welcome to our king and queen, published in 1902 in honor of the coronation of her son, Edward VII. Frederic Farrar, who is quoted, was Dean of Canterbury Cathedral.

Victoria's "Crown."

"I may mention an anecdote as one small illustration of that deep religious feeling which, throughout Queen Victoria's life, manifested itself in the tenderness of her sympathy for all who suffered among her people, and in that vivid sense of duty, directed by remarkable wisdom, which earned for her alone among English sovereigns the title of Victoria 'The Good.' On one occasion one of her chaplains, in preaching before her at Windsor, had made the Second Advent the subject of his discourse. After the sermon the Queen spoke to him on the topic which he had chosen and said:—'Oh how I wish that the Lord might come during my own lifetime!' 'Why,' asked the preacher, 'does your Majesty feel this earnest desire?' 'Oh,' replied the Queen with quivering lips and with her whole countenance lighted by deep emotion, 'I should so love to lay my crown at His feet.' The anecdote illustrates the feelings which dominated the Queen's mind."—Dean Farrar

Today is the 21st anniversary of the Islamist attacks on America. We pause to remember the husbands and wives, sons and daughters who died that day and in the years since in the pursuit of the evil movement that perpetrated the attacks.

Please take a moment to remember Jayesh Shah, a Tulsa Memorial High School and University of Tulsa alumnus, who died in the North Tower. Say a prayer for Jay's family, who still deeply miss their brother, son, husband, and father. The family spent the day at Ground Zero, as reported by ABC News:

Nikita Shah wore a T-shirt that bore the de facto epigraph of the annual commemoration -- "never forget" -- and the name of her father, Jayesh Shah. She was 10 when he was killed.

The family later moved to Houston but often returns to New York for the anniversary to be "around people who kind of experienced the same type of grief and the same feelings after 9/11," said Shah.

This 2002 story from the Houston Chronicle tells about Jay's family and their desperate search through the streets of New York for hopeful news that never came. In 2006, the Shah family presented a memorial flag, made up of the names of those who died, to the children's elementary school in Katy, Texas. In 2016, Sonia, Jay's oldest daughter and then a senior at Baylor University, spoke to the Associated Press about how the death of her father has motivated her to serve refugees.

A few months ago I came across Jennifer Senior's moving feature story in the September 2021 issue of The Atlantic: "What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind." McIlvaine was her brother's roommate in college and apartment-mate on September 11, 2001. She traces the way his mother, faither, brother, and fiancee have each dealt with their grief and with the notes and ephemera he left behind.

Tom Junod's story in Esquire from 2016 is worth re-reading: "The Falling Man: An unforgettable story." It is the story of the famous photograph of a man who has jumped or fallen from the World Trade Center, plunging headlong, vertically through the air, paralleling the vertical lines of the two towers. Junod pursues the photographer (who also photographed the dying Robert F. Kennedy, the photographs, and the mystery of the identity of the man in the photograph.

...the only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky--falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame--the Falling Man--became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew's photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory of unknown soldiers everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one simple acknowledgment.

That we have known who the Falling Man is all along.

Bookworm Room remembers Rick Rescorla, head of security of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, who anticipated another attack after the 1993 bombing, relentlessly drilled employees in evacuation procedures, and on the day, guided the 2,700 workers to safety, losing only six, including himself and two members of his team, who went back in the building one last time to make sure they had everyone out. Powerline has a tribute to Rick Rescorla, with more about his earlier life as a soldier in Vietnam and links to other tributes.

In 2017, Yahya Cholil Staquf, the head of the largest Muslim organization in Indonesia, the country with the largest population of Muslims, told an interviewer that the West needs to acknowledge the connection between orthodox Islam and violence:

Western politicians should stop pretending that extremism and terrorism have nothing to do with Islam. There is a clear relationship between fundamentalism, terrorism, and the basic assumptions of Islamic orthodoxy. So long as we lack consensus regarding this matter, we cannot gain victory over fundamentalist violence within Islam.

Radical Islamic movements are nothing new. They've appeared again and again throughout our own history in Indonesia. The West must stop ascribing any and all discussion of these issues to "Islamophobia." Or do people want to accuse me -- an Islamic scholar -- of being an Islamophobe too?...

Too many Muslims view civilization, and the peaceful co-existence of people of different faiths, as something they must combat. Many Europeans can sense this attitude among Muslims.

There's a growing dissatisfaction in the West with respect to Muslim minorities, a growing fear of Islam. In this sense, some Western friends of mine are "Islamophobic." They're afraid of Islam. To be honest, I understand their fear ... The West cannot force Muslims to adopt a moderate interpretation of Islam. But Western politicians should stop telling us that fundamentalism and violence have nothing to do with traditional Islam. That is simply wrong.

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The ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11 told the story of the events, beginning with the 1993 World Trade Center attack, that led to the 9/11/2001 attack. Because it put certain American politicians in a bad light, it has not been rebroadcast in the US, and the original version is hard to find, but not impossible for the tech savvy. (But read this before installing anything for more up-to-date technical information.) You can watch a documentary about the political pressure that led to the censorship of the mini-series, "Blocking the Path to 9/11," on the Internet Archive.

The Telegraph: 9/11: How the drama unfolded aboard Air Force One, inside the White House bunker and at the Pentagon

Video / audio from the day:

FAA, American Airlines, & NORAD real-time audio as air traffic controllers, airline officials, and military officials became aware of and responded to the attacks.
WNBC live coverage
Fox 5 live coverage
CNN live coverage

Footage from Hoboken, N.J., on 9/11: "Footage from September 3rd and 11th 2001 in Hoboken, NJ by Bruce Miller, Brad Miller, and Michael Frank and in Manhattan on September 19, 2001 by Bruce Miller. And some subsequent footage I shot during the 6-month Tribute in Light and Fleet Week 2002." Hoboken is directly across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan.

Some personal recollections of the day:

A year after the attacks, an exhibit of photos showing the aftermath, recovery efforts, and the indomitable spirit of New Yorkers toured the nation: Here Is New York. Our family saw it at the International Mall in Tampa in 2002. The domain name has been hijacked, sadly; the link will lead you to the Internet Archive. George Mason University captured the Here Is New York website in WARC (web archive) format, which can be played back using a tool like webrecorder.io.

Here Is New York's Voices of 9/11, containing video interviews with 500 eyewitnesses, recorded in 2002 and 2003, remains online.

New York singer/songwriter Beth Sorrentino wrote this song, "Beautiful Day," a week after the attacks. "It's a reflection and narrative of the events of that day and people I knew who were there, and worrying about their safety."

Presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer offers his account of 9/11 with President Bush aboard Air Force One, and the threat that the president's plane might itself be compromised by terrorists.

In 2009, HotAir blogger Allahpundit tweeted his memories of the day. He lived in downtown Manhattan, not far from the World Trade Center.

Ron Coleman was in midtown Manhattan when the planes hit. He writes of the confusion of the day and his journey, by foot and ferry, back to his home in New Jersey.

Gerard Vanderleun was watching from Brooklyn Heights when the towers fell, recording his observations online: "Lower span of Brooklyn Bridge jammed with people walking out of the city, many covered with white ash. Ghosts. The Living Dead. BQE empty except for convoys of emergency vehicles."

Here is Robert N. Going's diary of four weeks as a volunteer in a respite center at Ground Zero.

My personal recollection of the day and the weeks that followed, including the memorial service for Jayesh Shah, a Memorial High School and University of Tulsa alumnus who had died in the North Tower.

Rusty Weiss says, "9/11 saved my life," shocking him out of complacency as a responsibility-shirking young man.

Robert Spencer lists ten things we should have done since 9/11 to defeat Islamism, but we haven't because of political correctness. Number 4 rings a bell:

It is remarkable that thirteen years after 9/11, not a single mosque or Islamic school in the U.S. has any organized program to teach Muslims why the al-Qaeda/Islamic State understanding of Islam is wrong and should be rejected. Yet they ostensibly reject this view of Islam, so why don't such programs exist? Even more remarkable than their absence is the fact that no government or law enforcement authorities are calling upon Muslims to implement them.

Such programs must be instituted, and made transparent and open to inspection, so as to ensure their sincerity and thoroughness.

Tulsans who were paying attention in 2006 know what happens when a Muslim does speak out and explain that Islamists aren't good Muslims.