Don't stall: Just makea call, y'all

United we stood after 9/11.

But not for long.

Now divided we fall ever further into blame-game, buck-passing acrimony over not just 9/11's causes and effects but other problems, real and perceived. Lots of folks on both the left and right are increasingly certain that those problems are virtually all the fault of folks on the other side.

And we're not merely ominously divided.

We're ominously indecisive. On a wide range of pressing issues, we can't seem to make a call.

OK, so it's understandable that we have some stark, even bitter, disagreements over how to win the war on terror — and if there even is a need for such a war.

However, this dispatch from Tuesday's New York Times shows that our embarrassing inability to make a call goes far beyond matters of war, peace and how we handle our fanatical, murderous, elusive, resourceful enemies:

"At the World Trade Center site, the memorial to the people who died on Sept. 11, 2001, will not be open to the public in time for the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attack, as had been previously announced."

The Times added that "the final design is not even finished."

Those Twin Towers symbolized America's free-market vigor. Their destruction symbolized a barbaric attack on the American homeland. Our persisting failure to replace them with a new symbol of national resilience — again, that memorial won't be finished by 9/11/11 — symbolizes America's failure of will.

It's tempting to pin this particular disgrace, on a bipartisan basis, on former New York Govs. George Pataki, a Republican, and Elliot Spitzer, a Democrat. After all, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey owns that property, ranking those ex-chief executives highly among "the deciders" on the stalled memorial project.

But we're all to blame.

As for the self-billed national "decider," President Bush made a call to invade Iraq in 2003 — a call that far more Americans, including some prominent Democrats, echoed then than now. Yet that self-billed "conservative" didn't make his first spending-veto call until his second White House term despite an unprecedented federal pork fest.

Back to the Gotham State front: Public demand there and throughout the land should have forced a much quicker comeback on Ground Zero. We should have rebuilt the Towers — or something else if you favor the wrong choice — long before now. We should have made a call.

Instead, that empty space echoes our empty backbone.

An editorial in Tuesday's New York Post, which has a catchier way with words than the Times, aptly assessed the latest breakdown of this revealing process: "First we called it 'Pataki's Pit.' Then it was 'Eliot's Abyss.' Give Gov. [David] Paterson credit for bringing the charade to a halt before he, too, was sucked into the hole in the ground."

Other examples of the modern American vacillation contagion abound.

On the energy front, our indecisiveness has gotten excruciatingly expensive. We long ago should have rallied behind the causes of simultaneously building new refineries, drilling for more domestic oil, opening more nuclear plants, pursuing alternative- energy breakthroughs and intensifying conservation.

Maybe today's wrenching market forces will finally fuel those overdue decisions.

Maybe not. That Mideast oil embargo should have filled our motivation tank for those national self-defense missions in 1973.

On the local indecision front, port expansion and completion of the Mark Clark Expressway to Johns Island are still on protracted holds.

If we want to abandon one or both of those initiatives, let's do so.

If not, let's proceed.

Either way, let's make a call.

"Paralysis by analysis" pegs our procrastination plague. Our supply of delay excuses expands while our supply of resolve — and results — contracts.

We're too easily cowed by "haste makes waste" fears.

We should instead heed this counter cliche: "Time's a-wastin'."

Or, as Davy Crockett advised:

"Be always sure you are right, then go ahead."

And remember the Alamo.

Frank Wooten is associate editor of The Post and Courier. His e-mail is wooten@postandcourier.com.