Two bombings and a stabbing spree this past weekend-just under a week past the anniversary of 9/11. The discourse rambles on: it was a bomb. It was an “unexplained event”. It was irresponsible to call a bomb what is was…a bomb. In thinking about the news over the past weeks, we have athletes kneeling during our national anthem crying “oppression” whilst making millions of dollars, high school football players following suit in a display of solidarity and our usual celebrities (pick any of them) flapping their jaws. On any given day in America as we know it today, there is some college millennial “triggered” by chalk, Trump baseball caps, sushi at the student dining hall or dreadlocks at a New York fashion show.

Pick a story, any story and we will find, if we look closely enough, that there is a common underlying theme here. With the seeming inability of some people to utter the word “bomb” over the past 24 hours, my mind kept circling back to Sun Tsu’s “The Art of War“:

“So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong, and strike at what is weak.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

This is the problem, folks. We are WEAK. And our enemy lies in the darkness chipping away at our very foundation. Over the past 15 years, we have not seen 9/11-scale attacks on this country but we have weathered attacks upon our soil, attacks upon our ideologies and philosophies and attacks on our very spirit as Americans that have been enough to shake the very foundation upon which we were built. The foundation, once upon a time, has been strong but its plates are shifting and the core is crumbling underneath ever so slowly. What better way to attack a nation than by slowly undermining its values and filling its people full of defeat and self-doubt? What better way to crumble America than pitting its very own against one another-divided and hateful?