What Went Wrong

How could this have happened? An officer, a psychiatrist, at Fort Hood, has apparently gone off his nut and killed 13 soldiers, wounding 30 others.

The first clue might have been when the officer, a Muslim, compared suicide bombers to those who throw themselves on grenades to save the lives of their comrades.

Another clue might have been when he filled out a form seeking a spouse through a program at a mosque listing his birthplace as Arlington, Virginia, but his nationality as Palestinian.

The basic problem is that he saw himself as something else before he saw himself as American.

Theodore Roosevelt warned us of this over a hundred years ago, but we fell into the trap anyway. Why, you may ask?

Because we wanted to be nice.

We wanted to be nice, so instead of pointing out that "united we stand, divided we fall" we said nothing when once again people started identifying themselves as "whatever-Americans". We didn't want to be thought of as racist.

We said nothing when our language started to change, bending itself around political correctness. We didn't want to be thought of as intolerant.

We said nothing when our American beliefs and traditions came under assault from multiculturalism. We didn't want to be thought of as ethnocentric.

It happened when we pressed 1 for English. It happened when we let our public school administrators treat us as part of the problem instead of part of the solution. It happened when we allowed good people to be hung out to dry for BS reasons and didn't stand up for them.

Nidal Malik Hasan bore the weapon and squeezed the trigger that put 13 soldiers in their graves and 30 others in the hospital.

But we provided the bullets.