IN THE NAME OF THE BEST WITHIN
US
The following is from TIA Daily:
In the Name of the Best Within Us
The World's Reaction to September 11, Five Years Ago
by Jack Wakeland
He thought of a
summer day when he was ten years old. That day,
in a clearing of the woods, the one precious
companion of his childhood told him what they
would do when they grew up.... When he was asked
what he would want to do, he answered ....
"[We] ought to do something great.... Things
like winning battles, or saving people out of
fires, or climbing mountains...we must always
reach for the best within us. What do you suppose
is the best within us?"
—Eddie
Willers from Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
At 1368 and 1362
feet, the north and south towers of the World Trade
Center were the world's tallest buildings when they
opened in 1972 and 1973. Many of the 50,000 people
who worked in the seven buildings of the Trade Center
complex were key players in the capital markets that
determine the value of the world's productive
enterprises. These people worked for companies like
Morgan Stanley, AON Risk Services, Cantor Fitzgerald
Securities, Fuji Bank, Euro Brokers Inc., Oppenheimer
Funds, Bank of America, Lehman Brothers, and Credit
Suisse.
After each tower was
struck by a Boeing 767 jetliner carrying more than 75,000
pounds of fuel, it burned fiercely for an hour and
then collapsed. The twin collapses registered on
seismographs as earthquakes, magnitude 2.3 on the
Richter Scale. The falling rubble propelled choking
clouds of dust down streets nearly a mile away.
Five thousand people
were killed in the collisions and fires and quarter-mile-tall
columns of cascading debris. It could only be
compared to September 17, 1862, the day of America's
bloodiest loss in war. Unlike the Battle of Antietam,
however, millions of Americans watched this
catastrophe unfold in front of them on live
television.
The shock of the
loss shot across the entire nation in less than an
hour. Emergency measures, shutdowns, and
cancellations were as much an expression of grief and
fear and anger as they were an attempt to increase
security.
The FAA ordered
planes to land at the nearest airport, leaving
hundreds of thousands of travelers stranded. The
Sears Tower in Chicago, the Hancock Tower in Boston,
the Bank of America Tower in Seattle, and the Library
Tower in Los Angeles were evacuated. At offices,
manufacturing plants, and retail stores across the
nation, employers sent millions of distracted workers
home. Ford Motors and Daimler Chrysler shut down most
of their offices and factories in North America.
Starbucks shuttered nearly all of its 3700 coffee
houses across the country. Paramount, Warner Brothers,
and Sony Pictures vacated their studios.
While supersonic
fighter jets flew combat air patrols over New York,
Washington, Boston, Chicago, and many other major
cities, places where large numbers of people
congregate were emptied. Philadelphia's Independence
Hall, Washington's Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials
and the Washington Monument, Seattle's Space Needle,
St. Louis's Gateway Arch, South Dakota's Mount
Rushmore, city museums in New York and
Chicago—all were closed. The nation's largest
shopping complex, the Mall of America in Minnesota,
as well as amusement parks, like Busch Gardens, Sea
World, and Disney World, were shut down. Professional
baseball and football games and nearly all college
sporting events were postponed.
Employers in New
York's financial district struggled to set up
temporary offices to replace the 25 million square
feet of office space destroyed in the attack. Phone
and data companies worked feverishly to restore
communications to the NASDAQ and the New York Stock
Exchange.
The great stock
exchanges of Wall Street were silenced for more than
four days.
While police forces
in Manhattan cordoned off everything south of 14th
Street, thousands of people began making their way
downtown to post pictures of missing loved ones on
walls, poles, kiosks, and bus stops. Firemen from
across the nation took leave from their jobs to rush
to the city. Driven by grief, they felt they had to
be the ones to recover the remains of the 300 fire
fighters, 40 paramedics, and 50 policemen lost under
the rubble.
In every town and
city of the nation, Americans gathered in candlelight
vigils to remember the dead. They sang "America
the Beautiful" and "God Bless America"
in spontaneous outbursts of grief. When asked what
the total death toll might be, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani
answered, "More than we can bear."
The great towers
destroyed in the attack were not merely icons of
American capitalism. They were the final and dramatic
form given to the achievements of the American
system—the right to the pursuit of happiness
cast in concrete and glass and steel.
In The God of the
Machine, Isabel Paterson wrote that by liberating
the scientific, inventive, and productive energy of
the individual human mind, the American political
system had produced a new kind of city:
From the
beginning, the American city was a...generator of
more energy than the traditional form could
accommodate.... When the liquid capital from the
profits of...industry flowed back into New York,
the stream was directed under the very
foundations of the city. It shot up in steel and
stone, a terrific projection of energy, in the...great
skyscrapers....
This is what
our enemy had attacked. This is what he had
ravaged. It hit each of us at our core. An American
living in Beijing who heard the news of the towers'
collapse had the sudden, horrifying thought, "What
if America disappeared just like the World Trade
Center?"
The rest of the
world was struck by the same thought.
For decades,
Europeans have mocked American adults for laughing
and joking and carrying on as if we were enjoying an
endless youth. They regarded as us immature. In the
weeks after the attack, Americans stopped smiling.
In the shock of a
loss so great, the Europeans forgot their affected
superiority. It was partly because the attacks had
killed hundreds of Englishmen, Germans, and Frenchmen,
and citizens from nations throughout the continent.
But it was more than that. The sight of nationwide
suffering in America was too impossible, too
horrible, too much for them to bear. They cried with
us.
In personal acts of
grief, thousands of people laid flowers at the gates
of the American embassies in London, Paris, Rome,
Berlin, Ottawa. In Copenhagen it was drizzling when
two old men placed their memorial on the sidewalk
outside the American embassy; it was a bouquet with a
ribbon that read, "From the veterans of the WW
II resistance movement." In the seaside town of
Hastings, England, a shopkeeper told an American
correspondent, "every time I hear an American
accent, my heart aches for all of you."
Around the world
flags were flown at half-staff, concerts were
canceled, and sporting events postponed. European
leaders asked all to observe three minutes of silence
on September 14. In Toronto, among the crowds
gathered to remember those lost, many carried
American flags. The Queen of England ordered the Star
Spangled Banner played for the changing of the guard
at Buckingham Palace and joined her nation's leaders
at a memorial service in St. Paul's Cathedral.
American flags were flown in the streets of Paris,
and crowds at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate stopped to
listen to the American national anthem.
American
televangelist Robert Shuller told a CNN interviewer
that he had fielded dozens of phone calls from grief-stricken
Europeans. "I am 75 years old, and never have I
seen the whole world weep. This is the presence of
God!"
He was right, not
literally, but symbolically. The spirit that moved
these multitudes was the best within them.
In their grief, the
citizens of the Old World recognized America
as their motherland. America was the inspiration for
the French Republic; the American system gave
citizens of the British Commonwealth the standard
against which they measure their own freedoms;
American soldiers liberated Western Europe from the
Nazis and helped the Germans transform their society;
American nuclear weapons shielded Western Europe from
communist control for half a century.
America is the
fountainhead of human freedom. Its recognition of the
right to property and its capitalist system have been
the greatest engine of human happiness in history.
The American system liberated man from the necessity
of devoting his life to fighting off gangs of killers
and thieves. It left him free to make production
his highest moral purpose, free to devote his efforts
to reshaping the world to match his own personal
vision for the future.
Following the attack
on what, morally, is the capital of their world, the
people of Western Civilization rushed forward to
declare their citizenship in this greater republic of
liberty.
In the United States,
people unfolded old flags and rushed out to buy new
ones, and when all the flags sold out, they resorted
to pins and ribbons and stickers. From office
buildings, storefronts, and homes, automobiles, buses,
and trucks, they declared, "I am an American!"
People throughout
the entire Western world felt the same pride of
citizenship. Ferruccio De Bortoli, managing editor of
Corriere della Sera in Milan declared, "We
are all Americans. The distance from the United
States no longer exists because we, our values, are
also in the crosshairs of evil minds." He was
repeating the headline of Paris's Le Monde,
"We are all Americans now." In Berlin's
Riechstag, the majority leader of the German
parliament echoed John F. Kennedy's 1961 statement of
solidarity with the people of West Berlin by
declaring, "Wir sind Amerikaner." A
Canadian working in San Francisco wrote to the New
York Times that his wife was so moved by the
fortitude of the American people that she declared to
him that "she whole-heartedly wants to become an
American citizen."
For the first time
in its existence, the nations of the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization invoked Article 5 of the group's
charter. The attack on New York is to be considered
an attack on all 19 nations of the security union.
"In the darkest days of European history,
America stood close by us, and today we stand close
by America," explained Romano Prodi, president
of the European Union Executive Commission.
In the months and
years to come anti-American Leftists and terrorist
sympathizers will rise up among us, in America, in
Canada, and across Europe. Pragmatists will propose
craven half-measures. Skeptics will complain that we
are in a war that cannot be won; a war that it is
futile to fight.
We cannot allow
these demands to cause the citizens of the Western
world to forget what they implicitly understood on
September 11. All who stepped forward to declare
their common moral kinship with their tears; all who
stepped forward to declare their common citizenship
in the great republic that is Western Civilization;
all these hundreds of millions of men and women who
fulfill the stature of man—all of us have
a right to demand a morally inspired defense, a
defense worthy of our stature.
In Ayn Rand's Atlas
Shrugged, Eddie Willers realized what he was
fighting for only when it was too late: "business
and earning a living and that in man which makes it
possible—that is the best within us, that
[is] the thing to defend." Within the nations of
Western Civilization we must fight to defeat those
who would cloud our vision of what it is we are
defending.
Islamic
fundamentalism is a derelict ship that has drifted
from the Dark Ages into this century, loaded with
explosives that we invented. It seeks the death of
our civilization. We must not waver for a moment. We,
the people of the Western Civilization, must kill
this enemy and win this global war, in the name of
the best within us.
