Carry on carrying on

The British do this sort of thing so well. The Churchillian fist is raised to the skies, or into the Underground, and the steely-pluck issues forth. They have an advantage in that they are used to this sort of thing. They've lived through the Blitz, and 80 years of IRA nastiness, and they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and carry on with the business of living. The Americans should take a lesson from this. While 9/11 was hideous and an atrocity by any standard, other than in its magnitude, it represented nothing the Brits haven't experienced countless times over. They don't soil themselves over the atrocious elements in a mad world, they methodically fight back. They did it in the early 1940s, when they, for a brief moment, stood alone against the Nazi horde. They did it when the crypto-fascist Argentinians rattled their rusted sabres a couple of years ago, and said, "You want to fight with us? Very well. You shall fight with us." In the Brighton bombing, then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher straightened out her seams, and carried on with the business of the day. So, international terrorists may as well resign themselves to the fact that the Brits are not the Spaniards, who immediately wimped out following the Madrid bombing. They are not (I am ashamed to say) the Canadians who have proved themselves (at the governmental level) resolutely unprepared to take up arms against a sea of troubles that could evolve into global conflagration. We once were brave. We no longer are. The British still are. God bless them.