I remember it clearly

I was awakened on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, by a phone call from my daughter Katie. She was nervous, barely able to talk, and crying. She said she just wanted to let me know that her sister Grace was OK. Not knowing what had happened in New York — I lived in California and I’m a late riser — I didn’t know why she wouldn’t be. Grace was flying home that morning from New York City, but she’d flown several times half way around the planet and had criss-crossed the country dozens of times shuttling between parents in different states, and I’d long ago concluded that there are few places you can be that are safer than a Jumbo Jet at 28,000 feet above the noise.

But this wasn’t an ordinary flight. Grace had been supposed to fly out the day before, but bad weather and cancelled her flight and she’d been given a choice between a United flight – 93 – and a Delta flight to San Francisco. Having been made to circle Denver for an hour and then having to sit and wait for more hours with no news before boarding a connecting flight to Texas, all by United, she took the Delta flight and saved her life. Never has bad airline service been so important. She never made it to California because her flight was grounded in Omaha, the same city where the President stayed that night, and after a couple of anxious days she was able to get a bus back to Philadelphia, where her cousins took her back to New York where she goes to school. It was a long time before Grace would fly again.

“Turn on the TV, dad,” my daughter said to me, and like millions of other Americans I spent the next several hours transfixed by images of suicide bombers crashing planes full of unsuspecting passengers into office buildings full of unsuspecting workers. When watching TV turned out to be useless, I hit the Internet and gathered news about who’d done what and how much damage they’d caused from live reports posted in Usenet, The Well, and the blogs. I stumbled to work and sat stunned at a computer for the rest of the day amid a great hush interrupted only by the rustling of American flags printed on sheets of paper being pinned to the cubicle walls at 3Com. Small groups of people clustered in the hallways after a while, shaking, breaking out in tears, and trembling with rage.

I’ve seen a lot of the world outside the United States, living in Libya as a child and in India, Singapore, and Malaysia as an adult, and I’ve seen a lot of politics as a former lobbyist in Sacramento, but this was beyond politics. It was also beyond the usual goofy fanaticism of the Muslim religion with its call to prayer five times a day, its strict dietary rules, its fear of women and its maniac fasting month when people sit on the curbs in Malaysia with bags of fruit juice in their hands waiting for the Imam’s call to break their fast at the official sunset. This was insanity and a viciousness that breaks all the human boundaries around conflict and war and aggression. This was a direct attack on perfectly innocent people who had no stake in the governance of the Middle East, no responsibility for the backward condition of Arab states shackled to outmoded values by corrupt mullahs and political leaders mis-educated in Western universities suffering under the burden of fashionable ideas long ago and no interest in oppressing their counterparts halfway around the planet. This was beyond all of that, a new standard of bad behavior that could only be captured in old-fashioned words like “evil”.

We were lucky to have a simple-minded president who didn’t need to pass himself off as a pseudo-intellectual and was therefore able to call it by its name, to rally the country back to consciousness with a set of truly inspired speeches over the next few days and weeks, to build a sense of national unity and determination to strike back with appropriate force without fanning flames of hatred to a fever pitch. His finest moments were at the National Cathedral where he spoke against the background of a choir singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and before a meeting of Congress where he recognized the friendship of Prime Minister Blair. The military performed brilliantly in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, and the sponsors of terrorism got the message that America was not the weakling they thought it was and that we’re not interested in feeling the pain of others when we’re overcome nearly to exhaustion with our own.

Never again. We’re no longer asleep, and no longer so obsessed with our personal issues and our comfort and our 401Ks that we’ll sit quietly as our airplanes are hijacked and our children and fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers and neighbors are murdered. We understand the nature of the enemy we’re up against, and we’ve decided to face him, once and for all, with resolve and clarity and determination.

That doesn’t mean that we’ve stopped being the people we were, that we’ve surrendered our civil liberties or that we’ve gone to lynching everyone who looks like an Arab or a Muslim. We’re in the political high season again, and the President’s critics are all over the nation, nine of them assembling to compete with each other to condemn him and his friends and policies in the most crass and venal language they can muster. But that’s OK, they’re allowed to do that without fear of being detained or tortured or murdered, which is still a damn sight better than they’d be treated in the Taliban’s Afghanistan or Saddam’s Iraq or the Iran of the mullahs or the Korea of madman Kim Jong Il. And it’s not remarkable that they’re free to speak and act as they do, this is America and we’re tolerant and self-critical.

And certainly there’s a great deal to hold the President accountable for, a massive federal deficit, a still-sputtering economy just starting to show signs of life and some hard policies to swallow with no-bid contracts in Iraq and all the usual compromises between quality of life and a vibrant economy. So we criticize, and we ask him to do better, and we shake our fists at him, as we always do to the man in the White House, whether he deserves it or not. But we do this inside a perspective that we didn’t have before those planes struck those towers and so many people fell apart emotionally or were killed. We know that when the heat is really on, our President, like the rest of us, can dig deep and find his moral center and emerge to act with clarity. But more than that, we have a sense of our unity as Americans that we’d come close to losing in our squabbles between this idea and that and this group and that and in our general complacency.

This sense of unity is a gift that we gained at a very, very high price, and we’d do well not to squander it again, lest the next time it’s returned to us we find the price is too high. So let’s see if we can’t go about our political business with our rhetoric turned down a notch, the better to focus on what unites us and how we move our country and the rest of the world forward and in the right direction. We don’t have to keep our rage and our fear, but we’d better not move all the way away from them as long as we have so much to do in the way of calming the terror and the fanaticism that still grips so much of the world.

We have so much to do that we need all of best minds engaged in the work, regardless of their party or their religion or the color of their skins. What unites us will always be stronger than what divides us, and we can’t afford to forget that — our very survival is in the balance.

Never forget.