I sat all weekend trying to write a column about what happened in New York and Washington, D.C. I couldn’t do it. It’s not that I didn’t know what to say. I simply had to much to say and it’s all going in opposite directions. One moment I would send missiles flying to obliterate the Arab world and the next I would try to negotiate a political solution. In other words, like most of you, I’m completely unsure and harboring very contradictory feelings, with a lot of anger and emotional intensity.
It’s hard to think, or to sleep or to concentrate on anything else. So I decided to wait a week to try and let the ambiguities settle down, and instead, run some things done by other writers e-mailed to me by friends.
First is a column written by Leonard Pitts Jr. in the Miami Herald the day after the bombing. It is a profoundly elegant statement of who we are as a people and what America stands for. The second is a previously aired editorial from a radio broadcast by Gordon Sinclair, a Canadian Television commentator, for which all Americans should be indebted. In times of trial it’s good to hear from your friends. Lastly, is a personal account written by Jerry Derloshon, director of Public Information at Pepperdine, about one of their graduates who died in the Pittsburgh crash. All three letters touched me, and I’m sure they will do the same to you.
A failed cause
We’ll go forward from this moment It’s my job to have something to say.
They pay me to provide words that help make sense of that which troubles the American soul. But in this moment of airless shock when hot tears sting disbelieving eyes, the only thing I can find to say, the only words that seem to fit, must be addressed to the unknown author of this suffering.
You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard.
What lesson did you hope to teach us by your coward’s attack on our World Trade Center, our Pentagon, us? What was it you hoped we would learn? Whatever it was, please know that you failed.
Did you want us to respect your cause? You just damned your cause. Did you want to make us fear? You just steeled our resolve. Did you want to tear us apart? You just brought us together.
Let me tell you about my people. We are a vast and quarrelsome family, a family rent by racial, social, political and class division, but a family nonetheless. We’re frivolous, yes, capable of expending tremendous emotional energy on pop cultural minutiae-a singer’s revealing dress, a ball team’s misfortune, a cartoon mouse. We’re wealthy, too, spoiled by the ready availability of trinkets and material goods, and maybe because of that, we walk through life with a certain sense of blithe entitlement. We are fundamentally decent, though-peace-loving and compassionate. We struggle to know the right thing and to do it. And we are, the overwhelming majority of us, people of faith, believers in a just and loving God.
Some people-you, perhaps-think that any or all of this makes us weak. You’re mistaken. We are not weak. Indeed, we are strong in ways that cannot be measured by arsenals.
Yes, we’re in pain now. We are in mourning and we are in shock. We’re still grappling with the unreality of the awful thing you did, still working to make ourselves understand that this isn’t a special effect from some Hollywood blockbuster, isn’t the plot development from a Tom Clancy novel. Both in terms of the awful scope of their ambition and the probable final death toll, your attacks are likely to go down as the worst acts of terrorism in the history of the United States and, probably, the history of the world. You’ve bloodied us as we have never been bloodied before.
But there’s a gulf of difference between making us bloody and making us fall. This is the lesson Japan was taught to its bitter sorrow the last time anyone hit us this hard, the last time anyone brought us such abrupt and monumental pain. When roused, we are righteous in our outrage, terrible in our force. When provoked by this level of barbarism, we will bear any suffering, pay any cost, go to any length, in the pursuit of justice.
I tell you this without fear of contradiction. I know my people, as you, I think, do not. What I know reassures me. It also causes me to tremble with dread of the future.
In the days to come, there will be recrimination and accusation, fingers pointing to determine whose failure allowed this to happen and what can be done to prevent it from happening again. There will be heightened security, misguided talk of revoking basic freedoms. We’ll go forward from this moment sobered, chastened, sad. But determined, too. Unimaginably determined.
You see, the steel in us is not always readily apparent. That aspect of our character is seldom understood by people who don’t know us well. On this day, the family’s bickering is put on hold.
As Americans we will weep, as Americans we will mourn, and as Americans, we will rise in defense of all that we cherish.
So I ask again: What was it you hoped to teach us? It occurs to me that maybe you just wanted us to know the depths of your hatred. If that’s the case, consider the message received. And take this message in exchange: You don’t know my people. You don’t know what we’re capable of. You don’t know what you just started.
But you’re about to learn.
Leonard Pitts Jr.
Miami Herald
Tribute from Canada
Widespread but only partial news coverage was given recently to a remarkable editorial broadcast from Toronto by Gordon Sinclair, a Canadian television commentator [which was previously aired but not in response to last week’s events]. What follows is the full text of his trenchant remarks as printed in the Congressional Record:
“This Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most generous and possibly the least appreciated people on all the earth. Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts. None of these countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States.
“When France was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans who propped it up, and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. I was there. I saw it.
“When earthquakes hit distant cities, it is the United States that hurries in to help. This spring, 59 American communities were flattened by tornadoes. Nobody helped.
“The Marshall Plan and the Truman Policy pumped billions of dollars into discouraged countries. Now newspapers in those countries are writing about the decadent, warmongering Americans.
“I’d like to see just one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States dollar build its own airplane. Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tri-Star, or the Douglas DC10? If so, why don’t they fly them? Why do all the International lines except Russia fly American planes?
Why does no other land on earth even consider putting a man or woman on the moon? You talk about Japanese technocracy, and you get radios. You talk about German technocracy, and you get automobiles.
“You talk about American technocracy, and you find men on the moon not once, but several times – and safely home again. You talk about scandals, and the Americans put theirs right in the store window for everybody to look at. Even their draft-dodgers are not pursued and hounded. They are here on our streets, and most of them, unless they are breaking Canadian laws, are getting American dollars from ma and pa at home to spend here.
“When the railways of France, Germany and India were breaking down, through age, it was the Americans who rebuilt them. When the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central went broke, nobody loaned them an old caboose. Both are still broke.
“I can name you 5000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble? I don’t think there was outside help even during the San Francisco earthquake.
“Our neighbors have faced it alone, and I’m one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them get kicked around. They will come out of this thing with their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to thumb their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles. I hope Canada is not one of those.” Stand proud, America!
Gordon Sinclair
Alumnus hailed as hero
Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.” -Helen Keller
Businessman Thomas E. Burnett, Jr., 38, boarded a morning flight in Newark, New Jersey on September 11, bound for his home in San Ramon, outside San Francisco. Leaving the East Coast early meant he wouldn’t lose an entire day to travel. A 1992 President/Key Executive (PKE) graduate of Pepperdine’s Graziadio School of Business and Management, Burnett was a doer, someone who liked to make things happen. As senior vice president and chief operating officer of Thoratec Corp., his job was to make things happen.
There is no way he could have known that United Flight 93 was to end in a fiery crash outside Pittsburgh, killing all 45 passengers and crew members. There was no way he could have known that what he would say and make happen in the final hour of his life, would come to be heralded as nothing short of heroism.
Commandeered by radical terrorists on a suicide mission, Flight 93 was forcefully diverted from its westward heading and a course was set for Washington, D.C. It was to be the last of four “airline missiles” whose combined effect would culminate in the most vulgar expression of inhumanity the nation had ever experienced. Already three such missiles had abruptly ended several thousand lives striking the twin 110-story World Trade Center Towers in New York and the Pentagon building in Washington.
In cell phone conversations with his wife, Deena, who was at home serving breakfast to their three children, Burnett learned of the tragedies in New York and Washington. In several subsequent calls to Deena, placed while huddling with other passengers in the rear section of the plane, Burnett revealed that he and several co-passengers were plotting to thwart the hijackers’ plans to wreak further terror upon the nation’s capital, possibly preventing a direct strike on the White House or Capitol Hill itself.
During Burnett’s fourth call to Deena, he told her a group of passengers was going to try to do something. It was the last time the couple spoke.
No one can ever know for sure what transpired aboard Flight 93. The plane lost altitude rapidly; its last radar blip appearing at 10:03 a.m., 25 minutes before its projected arrival in the skies above Washington. Flight 93 crashed in a sparsely populated area, killing no one on the ground.
Quoted in a Los Angeles Times article two days later on September 13, Deena Burnett said she is confident that her husband, Tom, and the others, foiled the terrorists’ plans. “We may never know how many people helped him or what
they did,” she said. “But I know without a doubt that plane was bound for some landmark and they saved many, many more lives than were lost on that plane.”
Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), agrees. Murtha said he was convinced there was a struggle aboard Flight 93. “The target was the Capitol, the White House, the Pentagon, something significant,” he said. “Somebody made a heroic effort to keep this plane from hitting a populated area.”
In the aftermath of the tragedy, Thoratec President D. Keith Grossman called Burnett “an exceptionally bright man” who had a love of competition, a keen wit and a “very strong sense of right and wrong.”
In addition to his wife, Deena, Burnett is survived by three daughters-a 3-year-old, and twins who are 5. Their father didn’t set out to be a hero on September 11, 2001. But a hero is how he will always be remembered.
Jerry Derloshon
Director
Public Relations
Pepperdine University