Waynesboro News Virginian: "Time ends for slumber"

On New Year's Day 2010, the Waynesboro News Virginian's editorial was spot on.

As the conservative-leaning newspaper of the SWAC area, a daily read of the NV is a must ... and the New Year's Day editorial did not disappoint.

Citing warnings ignored and lessons to be learned but possibly ignored, the NV overviews catastrophies of the past decade:

A greater danger lurks than those inhuman and natural that swarmed over the United States starting in 2001. It is that the country will look upon the calamities of the last 10 years as a simple series of unfortunate events, as mere rotten luck. Viewing the decade this way without learning its lessons will doom America to repeat its recent history, to even starker results.

Consider the 9/11 attacks. For years in advance of that awful morning, members of the Federal Aviation Administration’s so-called Red Team, assigned to test airport and airline security, had warned top officials and Congress of vulnerabilities in the system. Those warnings were substantively ignored. The recent bombing attempt on Northwest Airlines demonstrates remarkably that even after 9/11 aviation security remains an aberration. The terrorist attacks of 2001 were preventable. The same will apply the next time.

Similarly, engineers for decades had warned that New Orleans could not withstand a major hurricane, that if a Category 3 storm or larger rumbled into the Bayou, levees would break and lives would be imperiled. Those calls went unheeded. Hopes that the inevitable would not occur were shattered, and homes and families with them.

Those at the News Virginian get it. With a chilling reminder of what lies before us, the editorial concludes by warning:

This might well be the decade that determines whether the country ascends again or makes her decline permanent. It is a time for hard thinking and hard work.

Millions of conservatives have rolled up their shirt sleeves for some hard thinking and hard work. Millions more are needed.

To quote former President George W. Bush, "We're ready, we're steady, we're resolved."

Now let's get to work.