FRIday, SEPTEMBER 14, 2001

The last best hope of mankind

 

There are things we see, pictures that become part of our lives, that we never forget.

If I live to be 102 years old, I doubt I'll ever lose the memory of desperate people, knowing they had reached their time to die, jumping to their deaths from the upper floors of the World Trade Center buildings Tuesday.

I didn't see the man and the woman who jumped together, holding hands as they plummeted hundreds of feet, but I will long remember the quote from a man who did.

"They seemed to come down so slowly."

Things changed very fundamentally in this country this week, and I'm not sure they will ever change back. When terrorists hijacked four airliners and destroyed both towers of the World Trade Center as well as part of the Pentagon, they brought terrorism to America in a way few people ever had imagined possible.

We had considered the possibility of nuclear weapons smuggled into a city, or even the horror of chemical or biological weapons, but the thought that the very planes that fly overhead all the time could be turned into weapons of mass destruction seemed like something out of a Tom Clancy novel.

Anyone who didn't know it before should be very aware of one fact: There are people in this world who hate us.

Yes, Sally Field, they really, really hate us.

In Palestine Tuesday evening, children cheered and celebrated the deaths of thousands of Americans in New York and Washington. At the same time national leaders were decrying these acts of barbarism, people in various parts of the world were smirking at the thought of America brought to its knees.

Some of them call us the "Great Satan."

Others call us imperialists.

Some jerk in some far-off land, commenting on the BBC's Website, suggested that people should "imagine a world in which America did not exist." He seemed to be suggesting that such a world would be a better place.

I see it differently, of course. In a world where America did not exist, who would have saved the world from Hitler? Who would have served as the lone significant bulwark for more than 40 years against a Soviet Union that really did want to impose its will on the rest of the world?

These idiots know that, but they would rather whine about "economic imperialism, as though we were forcing people at gunpoint to drink Coca Cola, eat at McDonalds or wear American blue jeans. They conveniently ignore the fact that thousands of people risk their lives every year for the chance to come to America, that despite our myriad flaws, we really are the last best hope of mankind both for economic opportunity and for personal freedom.

Does too much money corrupt our political system? Yes, but when was the last time a losing candidate was exiled or killed?

Are we sometimes intolerant of others' religious beliefs? You bet, but when was the last time we prevented someone from worshipping -- or not worshipping -- as they saw fit?

We are certainly not a perfect country. Just ask anyone who has ever been the victim of racism. But ever since we stopped enslaving people and killing them for trying to exercise their rights, we have refused officially to tolerate that sort of behavior. And while our treatment in past centuries of Native Americans will always be shameful, we do not practice genocide for ethnic, racial or religious reasons.

Think about this if you will. The people who hate us more than anyone these days are Muslims, but who is it we were protecting when we went to war in the Balkans? That's right, Muslims.

We are a country that does more than almost any other nation on Earth to live up to a set of high ideals. We consider ourselves a meritocracy, and our greatest stories are of people who fought their way up from poverty against great odds and made the most of their potential.

Even our sometimes far-too-fawning respect for the rich isn't usually for those who were born wealthy. Folks like Bill Gates accomplished what they did by building the proverbial better mousetrap, and they were well rewarded for it.

During the five years I wrote a column for a daily newspaper, I met countless people who embodied the American Dream, but I will always remember a young Vietnamese woman named Jenny Thatch, who along with her husband worked 100 hours a week or more so that they could have their own little donut shop in Rancho Cucamonga, California. Ask her about the American Dream and the odds are she'll have a very different view of it than Osama bin Laden.

It is almost a cliché now to say that the Baby Boom generation has never been tested in the way our parents were, and it will become equally clichéd to say that Tuesday's terrorist bombings were this generation's wakeup call.

But for those of us who came of age in the '60s and '70s, whose lives were shaped by men like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, it probably would be fair to say that our view of our country was a little more jaundiced. When folks waved the flag and spoke of loving America or leaving it, we winced.

But Wednesday, one of my childhood friends from back in Virginia sent me an e-mail saying that to honor the people who died Tuesday, we should all wear red, white and blue Thursday and drive to and from work with our lights on. Then on Friday, we should all light a candle and hold it up at 7 p.m.

The message would be simple and straightforward:

"We stand united -- we will not tolerate terrorism."

It's an important message, one that needs to be understood. This country is hated and feared by terrorists precisely because we have stood as mankind's bulwark against those who would enslave people.

As long as we're here, they lose.

As long as we stand firm, they will always lose.

As we remember Tuesday's pictures and sounds of horror, there's something else we ought never to forget.

God has blessed America for more than 200 years. We need to pray that He continues to bless us.