If you want to preserve those freedoms you have to take the battle to the world and slog on for years on many different

If you want to preserve those freedoms you have to take the battle to the world and slog on for years on many different fronts.The other answer is that the young of America will be utterly changed by this experience. Each successive generation is shaped by the times in which it grows up. The sense of civic duty of the immediate post-war generation was shaped by the sacrifice of its parents, the next by the indulgence of the 1960s and the military failure in Vietnam. This one will be shaped by an experience America has not known for nearly 200 years, an attack on its homeland.

The people who have been killed are not soldiers sent abroad; they are young mums and dads. Some 1,500 children of the employees of Cantor Fitzgerald have lost a parent. Heavens knows what the future may hold, but even assuming there are no further serious attacks, an event of this magnitude will push America in a different direction for a generation.If this is right, it also means that liberal democratic values everywhere will be secure for a generation, for this change in the American psyche will affect the whole world, not just the US. Most people in Britain realise that, hence the widespread staunch, intuitive support for America.

If this is right, then America will change in ways that will buttress that support. It will become less self-indulgent, less legalistic, more gritty, more civic-minded. Maybe the child that drew the picture of the angels at the Brooklyn Heights esplanade understood this: that out of something terrible comes something better.. A white police officer was acquitted yesterday over the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man, an incident that sparked Cincinnati’s worst racial unrest in three decades. A white police officer was acquitted yesterday over the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man, an incident that sparked Cincinnati’s worst racial unrest in three decades.
Stephen Roach had been charged with negligent homicide and obstructing official business after he shot Timothy Thomas, 19, in a dark alley early on 7 April. Ralph E Winkler, a Hamilton County municipal judge, gave the verdict after hearing the trial without a jury, at Mr Roach’s request.

The officer did not testify.”Thomas’ actions in running from numerous police and not following police orders .. was unfortunate,” the judge said. He added that Mr Roach’s record was unblemished, while Mr Thomas’ was not, and noted that Mr Thomas failed to respond to an order to show his hands. He concluded that the shooting was “not a culpable criminal act”.In three nights of rioting that followed the shooting, dozens of people were injured and more than 800 were arrested before a temporary curfew ended the disturbance. The Ohio city had not seen such racial unrest since the Rev Martin Luther King Jnr was assassinated in 1968.As a precaution, city officials said that additional police would be on duty when the verdict was announced. They said they did not expect a repeat of the earlier violence.Mr Roach, 27, was believed to be the first Cincinnati police officer to go to trial on charges of killing a suspect, the police said. He had faced up to nine months in jail if convicted.Mr Thomas had been wanted on 14 warrants, including traffic charges and fleeing police. Before being killed, he had run from three other officers and scaled fences in a neighbourhood plagued by guns, drugs and violence, Mr Roach’s lawyer said.