The Coming Together of America
September 13, 2001
By John L. Perry
contributor to Newsmax.com
NEWSMAX.COM — The worst of times bring out the best in Americans. It’s happening at this moment, compatriots surging to support this nation, its values, its president.
Nor is it altogether a pretty picture in its magnificence.
In the first day or so after the Eleventh of September terrorist assault on America, the president gave the appearance of being off stride, somewhat unsure of where he was going. There was for a short while there, without question, a frightfully dangerous leadership vacuum at the nation’s very pinnacle.
The mantle of leadership slipped from his shoulders … and fell onto those of “ordinary” Americans, who stepped up to the challenge and proved to be, to the contrary, quite extraordinary.
A Most-Uncommon People
This spontaneous manifestation of inner quality came forth in the most-uncommon of common men and women of New York City within seconds after the blows fell.
Two young men working near the top of one of the World Trade Center towers grasped a wheel-chair-bound woman and, between them, carried her – step by agonizing step – down more than 80 flights of stairs to the safety of an ambulance. It took them an hour. It was their finest.
Two fellow victims, coated with the towers’ gray dust-to-dust mantle and looking more like refugees from an Egyptian-mummy horror movie, assisted one another away from the scene. It was impossible to tell their gender, their race, their religion, their politics. The beauty of it was it didn’t matter, to them or anyone else.
Despite their coats of dust, it was written all over them that they were Americans. And they were setting an example, carried around and around the globe, of what it is to be American.
America’s New Exemplars
New Yorkers, those inimitable souls so often caricatured as brusque, rude, arrogant, pushy, self-centered … those New Yorkers disappeared. In their place were the same individuals, now brave, selfless, caring, loving, self-sacrificing … those are the New Yorkers now become the world’s ineradicable image of what Americans are truly like.
This nation owes them an irredeemable debt. They need to know their fellow Americans are proud of them, beyond words.
Off the island of Manhattan and from there all across this stunned land has spread this new Americanism, which – on closer examination – is nothing other than the true Americanism that has been here all along, ever since there was an America.
These were individual Americans asserting individual leadership, not waiting for their mayors, their governors, their senators and representatives or even their president to lead them. They led one another.
You Can Tell It Where You Live
Every American has seen that on television from the terror sites, seen it in their neighbors wherever they live, seen it in their own families, seen it in themselves.
On the second day, the president began to emerge as the kind of leader demanded by the occasion. It was almost as if, overnight, George W. Bush had come of age politically, as if he had taken his new strength, his now-certain direction, from his people, rather than they from him.
Is that a condemnation? Not at all. In fact, it may just be the finest accolade any president could ask, the most-fitting admiration that any people could earn.
What a strange, exhilarating chemistry this has been, this coming together of America, this coalescence of a nation and its leader.
It is not coming about without its blemishes.
A Fallout of Filth
As would be expected, NewsMax.com has been covered in e-mail – its own form of fallout from the terrorist explosions. Seeping into this outpouring has been the most-sickening, most-revolting commentary imaginable – no, it slithers beyond the imaginable.
The thrust of those commentaries – the worldwide Internet graffiti afforded the sane and the insane alike – has been to lunge upon the nation’s tragedy as a means of venting pent-up venom against George W. Bush left over from the close presidential campaign.
Right there among the worst were the usual suspects, led by the non-journalist “news” anchors of network television. They were doing their dead-level best to paint the president as a coward playing politics at a time of national crisis.
Throughout American history, in times of national peril, there have always been such croakings from the gutter. George Washington was spitefully used, accused as a traitor. Abraham Lincoln was calumniated as looking like an ape. Franklin D. Roosevelt was slandered mercilessly even as the outcome of World War II was still in doubt. Ronald Reagan was ridiculed, belittled and demeaned.
And We Can Do It Again
But those canards never tore apart the fabric of the nation. Instead, the cumulative effect was to make America that much stronger, to contribute to the coming together of the nation. The same will happen again, for most Americans cannot abide such garbage.
To dwell on those fulminations would be to invite being sucked into the maelstrom of hatred, to answer in kind would be to join the madness.
It is important to know such feelings are there, like shards of glass mingled amid the debris of terrorism, to understand them and never to forget that hatred lives.
But they are only a miniscule counterpoint to the overwhelming outpouring of supportive sentiments this national tragedy has evoked. The American people are fundamentally decent, caring people, and always have been.
A Tolerance So Grand
One of the exasperating, yet thrilling, attributes of this unique democracy is that it can be so great as it is and yet accommodate within itself the inescapable bad seed.
There will be rough days – indeed, if a prediction is in order, the worst is yet to come. America and Americans will be tested still more. But they will come through it, without slipping into the attributes of those who hate America.
The president will have days in which he is not his very best. He, too, is human. When those inevitable slips occur, the American people are strong and good enough to take up the slack.
And when they stumble, this president is the kind of man who is strong enough to reach out a hand and help his nation through its worst times.
Now Joined at the Heart
Indeed, the two together, George W. Bush and the American people, like the terror-dusted pair seen helping one another through the Eleventh of September horror, will make it through whatever perils await.
There has been a temptation – admittedly here – to feel the president did not move far enough, swiftly enough to right the terrible wrong done America.
That is an understandable, though not altogether flattering, human impulse – one it is well to resist.
It now is becoming apparent that the president is moving in a steady, step-by-step fashion, resolutely, sure-footedly. The goal has been set – an all-out war on terrorism worldwide.
One Sure Step at a Time
A nation does not arrive at such a momentous goal by lurching. And this president is proving himself not a lurcher.
George W. Bush is doing what has to be done at the outset in order to do the ultimate thing right.
It is well worth the time it takes.
In the process, he is helping create, while building upon, a newly come-together America.
When the sun rose on the Eleventh of September, this was an unhappily divided nation, symbolized by the narrow split on Capitol Hill, a president who barely won election and a populace absorbed in its own selfishness and trivia. Acrimony and fear ran deeply.
What a Difference a Disaster Makes
The terrorist attacks changed all that in a blinding flash. Suddenly, the important things in life – beginning with life, itself – came into clear focus. People, and those who love them, towered taller than any steel skyscrapers. Loved ones, rather than love of possessions and perquisites, became the priceless treasures.
One moment there were Bush’s political opponents cutting him up in Congress. The next, the same were refusing to comment on anything divisive. They could not clamber aboard fast enough. Don’t demean them. They are welcome – essential – if this nation is to endure.
Possibly the oratory most eloquent in all this tragedy so far came from one of Bush’s harshest critics, Sen. Charles Schumer of New York. Without notes, what he had to say came from the heart. He did his city, his state and, yes, the nation proud.
There will be more and more of this as the nation flings its arms around itself.
A long, dangerous road twists ahead.
Care Enough to Get the Very Worst
There needs to be certainty, dead certainty, as to who did this to America, and with whose conniving help.
To lurch to an easy conclusion that it is the coward in the cave in Afghanistan and miss the larger fact that the ultimate culprit could be someone like Saddam Hussein would be unacceptable.
If the terrorists could find the time to contrive the Eleventh of September attacks, the United States of America has the time, the maturity and the resolution to bring down the hammer where it hurts most.
What you are witnessing is America’s coming together – at long last.
The Unintended Consequence
The beauty, amid all the horror, is that this was not at all what the terrorists had in mind to accomplish as they aimed the stolen airliners to their doom.
They never knew that this is America, and there is nothing that Americans – come together – cannot do.
John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is senior editor and a regular columnist for NewsMax.com.
Reproduced with the permission of NewsMax.com . All rights reserved
