Another victory for people! Take that, Wall Street!

If only the Occupiers could tell us what, precisely, they wish to change (other than their clothes).

There’s no question that some of the young people milling around Wall Street have legitimate grievances. Job creation remains stagnant; lots of bright young people—and no small number of middle-aged workers—are out of work or underemployed. The national unemployment rate seems stuck at just over 8 percent. That’s bad enough, but things actually are worse here in New York, where the rate is 10 percent.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some people are taking their anger to the streets. The problem is that the Occupy movement is steered by folks who are using legitimate grievances as an excuse to demonize the successful, provoke the police and otherwise display their contempt for free enterprise and American capitalism.

That much is obvious in the rhetoric of the Occupy leaders. They don’t have a plan. They don’t have an alternative. They don’t have points to negotiate. They certainly don’t have the ability to turn discontent into political action. (For all the publicity they’ve received, have the Occupiers had any influence over this year’s presidential campaign?)

What Occupy’s leaders lack in specific plans, they make up for in demagogic speeches and publicity stunts. True, they have won the hearts and minds of English and history professors around the country, which ought to be proof positive that they have nothing practical to offer. But for the millions of Americans who are out of work, for the millions who live at the margins, the Occupiers must seem to be absolutely frivolous. What solutions do they propose? What programs do they support? What job-creation strategy do they wish to implement?

The short answer: They have no plans, no strategies, no programs. Oh, they do enjoy thumbing their noses at authority. As they gathered downtown on Monday, some Occupiers demanded that police officers identify themselves by name—“in case you decide to attack me,” as one Occupier put it.

What a charming group. You’d think that given their keen sense of class consciousness they might see police officers—or anybody who works for a living—as comrades of sorts. But that would require them to reconsider their own prejudices and attitudes. And that would be almost unbearable.

So they march and shout and disrupt and hope that they will at least provoke a police officer into arresting them. They can tweet news of their arrest in real time, and know that they are considered heroes in some of the best faculty lounges in the land.

The rest of us will pay them little attention, since they really have nothing to say.

On that morning, few Americans had ever heard of Osama bin Laden and the terrorist organization he directed from Afghanistan. That anonymity was a source of great frustration for a man who sought to be the world’s leading jihadist, who had tried to provoke the United States and the West into a holy war with attacks on other American targets in the 1990s. He did not get the attention he sought; he did not get the war he wished to lead. And so he dispatched 19 men to the United States to carry out a suicide attack that he believed would either cripple those he hated or lure them into a conflict they could not win.

He was wrong, of course, and now he is dead and the terrorist group he led, al Qaeda, is on the run. Yes, the terrorists are dangerous, still, after all these years, but their leaders have good reason to wonder if American eyes are watching their every move. They know that the forces of outraged civilization have not lost heart during this long and violent decade. Justice may arrive in the form of a SEAL team, or a cruise missile. Justice may wear many uniforms, or none. Justice may be carried out in a courtroom, or at the bottom of the sea.

And so the war goes on, a long war but a necessary one. There can be no doubt how it will end, if, that is, Americans work together to create and maintain widespread prosperity, economic freedom and individual liberty.

The United States remains as it was on that day a decade ago—a worldwide symbol of opportunity and progress. That is precisely why the terrorists boarded those planes on that lovely September morning, why bin Laden chose to bring war to these shores. The medieval world view of al Qaeda could not and cannot tolerate the liberties and freedoms that Americans take for granted. The jihadists knew they could not win a contest of ideas, so they chose a war that depended on the death wish of deluded followers.

Still, victory for the U.S. and all that it stands for is not assured; indeed, if the U.S. cannot rouse itself from today’s malaise, if it cannot continue as a progressive, dynamic champion of liberty and economic growth, this war could still be lost.

It should not come to that. But as we reflect on the lives we lost a decade ago, as we think about the ways we are different from the way we were on Sept. 10, 2001, we should remember that we have work to do before we dare declare victory.

It is not enough to kill those who seek to kill us. We cannot allow ourselves to fall behind, to become anything less than a place where opportunity is available to all. That will never do.