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WHAT AMERICA IS REALLY ABOUT
A moving and beautifully written article by syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. was widely circulated on the nation's e-mail lists the day following the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington D.C. In it the "monsters" and "beasts" who planned and carried out the "coward's attack" on America were warned that "they don¹t know what Americans are about."
According to Senator Hillary Clinton, the world trade towers were struck because they were what America is about, reflecting our nation's wealth, its power and potential and values.
Pitts' and Clinton's messages were only two of countless expressions of righteous anger, hurt and disbelief that such an assault could penetrate our security and shatter forever the illusion of American invulnerability.
The messages variously referred to unreasoning and incomprehensible hatred of "our way of life,"... "our freedom or democracy,"... "our lifestyle," or "what we¹re about."
Many of them brought tears to my eyes, and watching on television the brave efforts of individual heroes, emergency personnel and the national outpouring of love, sympathy and help, I thought, this indeed, is what the real America is all about.
Not trade. Not wealth. Not Hollywood and rock stars and sports teams and casinos. Not the chattering and scribbling elite who presume to speak for America. Not the rulers and the world organizations who while seeking to consolidate their own power bases have chipped away at the freedoms and aspirations of individual Americans while failing to protect us from the true enemy. This is real. This is the heart and soul, courage and compassion of everyday America at work.
The awesome power of American goodness is clearly visible to a shocked and sympathetic world, now, in our time of trouble. And a reminder of what we're fundamentally about is the one good thing that has come out of this act of destruction unparalled in our nation's modern history.
Because the truth is, much of what the world has seen in recent years is an arrogant and ostentatious distortion of what America is truly all about.
Wall Street and Hollywood, glitzy entertainments and material wealth are not what our heart is about. They are only the inherited products of hardworking pioneers who built a nation in singular freedom, of individual farmers and ranchers and miners and loggers who toil on the land to feed, house and clothe us, to transport us and provide the essentials for our conveniences and technologies. We are about firemen and police officers and rescue workers committed to protecting us and upholding the unique Constitution that created our republic. We are about what the world is seeing now, courtesy of a hardworking news media suddenly catapulted from tiresome trivia, humble communities of people reaching out their hands to lend aid and comfort to their afflicted fellow Americans.
We are about God who, in our complacency of past decades, we thought we could do without. We have called Him back now to comfort and guide a chastened people, for we have been humbled. The world has been presented with graphic evidence that despite our false gods of wealth and power, we, like all people everywhere, are weak and vulnerable without the one true God's guiding wisdom.
My prayer is that the spiritual and patriotic reawakening that came to us so suddenly and violently will give our leaders and ourselves the courage and strength of purpose to portray once again the just and good and wise America that earned the respect of the world... an America that will handle with faith and resolve whatever the future may bring.
"God bless America," the President proclaims daily.
May He indeed, lest we forget again what we are really all about.
Payson.cc © 2001 Carrol Cox
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