At no other time in history...

Families Heckle Giuliani at 9/11 Hearing, per Yahoo!News.

Outraged relatives of World Trade Center victims heckled former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on Wednesday as their hopes that he would be grilled by the Sept. 11 commission faded in the face of gentle questioning and effusive praise from panel members. "My son was murdered because of your incompetence!" shouted Sally Regenhard, whose firefighter son died in the trade center. Seated three rows behind Giuliani, she jabbed her finger at the former mayor and waved a sign that read "Fiction" as he gave the city's emergency response a glowing review.

In Colonial House, over at the RoughWoodsman, Swamphopper states,

I spent the last two nights watching the Colonial House series. Postmodernist 21st century Westerners trying to reenact 17th century Puritan colonization had its expected results: Sabbath violations, profanity, drunkenness, laziness, etc. Those same human frailties existed in the Puritan colonies too, but I bet that in the 1600’s the need to survive most often superceded the desire to usurp one’s independence. I think Jamestown would have been a better comparison to the Colonial House setting than Puritanism.

The Happy Homeschooler echoes Swamphopper's comments in her post, also titled Colonial House. She states,

Would someone please make the women of Colonial House STOP WHINING? Yikes. What did they expect? Room Service? Did their education in history limit them so much that they did not know what to expect in terms of life in those times? Did they expect a Colonial House with ERA? Did they expect religious diversity? Did they expect religious freedom?

What do these stories have in common? They illustrate how far removed the 21st century West is from the brutal realities of life. We have become so accustomed to having things go our way that we've forgotten how the rest of the world lives - and dies. Was it a tragedy that so many innocent lives were lost on 9/11? Certainly! Were mistakes made in the emergency response? Probably. Does that indicate incompetence? Even if it did, what right do we have to expect recourse? Does anyone really expect 21st century postmodern Westerners to understand what Puritans experienced simply by putting them in semi-comparable physical conditions? I realize that the reality show mentality mandates that arguments and in-fighting occur between the participants, but other than make it a glorified soap opera, what has been gained? A true understanding of the Puritan worldview? I doubt it. My brother-in-law and my sister are missionaries and have spent a fair amount of time in Central America. He told me of an incident in which a group of people from the U.S. flew down to El Salvador, for a week, to provide medical assistance. At the end of the week, as the group was preparing to return to the States, one of the members told my brother-in-law, "Well, I guess it's time to head back to reality." After pondering that statement my brother-in-law realized that it was, in actuality, the other way around. The living conditions he was in, there in El Salvador, is reality for most of the world - these volunteers were traveling back not to reality, but to our Western fantasy.