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Seeing America's Bright Shining Light |
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When people say, “American will never be the same,” they’re right; terrorism has changed us. But not altogether for the worst. The dark soot and smoke that blew across America has helped us see our country more clearly now. Ironically through that darkness, we can now see America in a new light. We can see our better side. We can see America the Beautiful. We can see that the melting pot we have become, which a lot of Americans had begun to disparage, turns out to be one of our greatest strengths. We see that those who bravely responded to the attacks -- many becoming victims themselves -- were of all colors, and bore names and accents imported from all corners of the globe. We see them as selfless and incensed as those of us with the good luck to have been born here. Furthermore, you can bet that when the United States does strike back at its adversaries and those who nurture them, the heroes who follow our flag to the heart of the beast likewise will bear names, and skin colors, and accents and ancestry from every continent. We are a melting pot, but we see more clearly now that those who melt into it morph into American patriots themselves. We also now can clearly see who real American heroes are. Not the overpaid athletes and entertainers who have come to be loosely labeled as heroes in our celebrity-centered culture. Rather, we see the personification of heroism in the underpaid firefighters and police officers, the medics and common citizens confronted with uncommon crises. Like two firefighters who drove from Kentucky and said, “We’re willing to wash dishes or pull bodies or whatever they need. We don’t care what we’re doing as long as we’re doing something.” We see heroism too in airline passengers doomed to a fate from which they bravely saved countless strangers. We see the best now in almost all our citizens, from professional football players who made it unanimously clear to the NFL that they had no heart for the game in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, to New Yorkers, who showed nothing but good will in a city known for ill will: strangers sharing in the search for survivors, people patiently waiting in the hot sun to give blood, nobody even exploiting the chaos to commit common crimes. Everyone found a way to contribute. A New York real estate salesman showed up to help, “even if it’s just to carry a bucket of dirt.” Others said they knew they could best help by staying out of the way. They did. After so much bickering amongst those who make government, we also now can clearly see that we are still the supreme exemplar of democracy. But for one living President too ill to attend, five more, of different backgrounds, different ideologies and different temperaments, came together, sat together, mourned and prayed together. Where else on earth?! We could see flag sales rise as never before, and in our countless observable displays of patriotism, almost precisely on the anniversary of the attack that inspired it, we could hear how much nicer the Star Spangled Banner sounds when not scored as a rock song. We heard in fact that the Star Spangled Banner was played all around the world, which helped us see that while some hate us, others admire and look up to us. An Italian newspaper wrote, “We are all Americans.” We could see too that in some ways, we are no different than mysterious cultures elsewhere on earth who briefly get our attention on the tube. People running from the remnants of war, posting photos of their lost loved ones, weeping at the loss of control over their own lives. These weren’t scenes from Turkey in an earthquake or Kosovo in a war. They were New York City. We also could see that in our consistent but costly support of Israel, we’ve teamed up with the right side. While many of Israel’s adversaries kept their mouths shut, some opened them wide to cheer the attacks against us. We see more clearly now why we support Israel: because in that whole godforsaken corner of the planet, it is the only democracy, the only nation that shares the moral, cultural and religious values that we hold dear. What can we see more clearly now than anything else? That we aren’t just a nation of almost 300 million people. We are one people. We are America the Beautiful.
Greg Dobbs is Executive News Editor and Co-Founder of BoomerCafe. His email is: greg@boomercafe.com.
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by
Greg Dobbs