Times That Try Men's Souls

David Schribman has an interesting piece on a survey of historians, asking them to rank the most trying times in US History. The current time, whose immense gravity most Americans accept and which the president uses to justify his power grab, is nowhere near the top. I've written before on the myth that the world somehow dramatically changed on Sept. 11, 2001. The simple truth is nothing changed on 9/11. Terrorists were trying to attack the US long before then, and still are. The only difference is that 9/11 made Americans aware of the fact pretty dramatically. That attack is just a terrible anomaly. Americans need to get that through their heads and stop giving in to fear and handing over too much power to the government.