Beck said:

You know everything is too big to fail, but nobody talks about the little guy. Nobody talks about the individual. Let me ask you this question. Please ponder this over the holiday season. Heaven forbid anything happens. God help us if al Qaeda would come but imagine if somebody could succeed in blowing up any of our great American icons. If they destroyed all of Washington, let’s just pretend that we would be as lucky as we were with the World Trade Center where everybody was gone or most people were gone—and they destroyed the Washington Monument and everything else—all of our enduring symbols, all the monuments we’ve always treasured—would it matter?

I don’t think so. The monuments are meaningless. The monuments are there to remind us who we are. But we have forgotten. We have become about the structure. We are the people that defeated the most powerful empire on earth as a group of rag-tag farming colonists. We were the people that explored. We mapped. We tamed the west. We crossed the mountains in wagons. We stunned the world with technical marvels and defeated the Nazis. We defeated the communists. We walked on the moon.