On September 11, 2001, I was working for a school district in Missouri. I didn't have a TV in my office, so as soon as I heard the news, I turned on my radio. Our local radio station had Peter Jennings being rebroadcast and I remember his voice most of all.
I liked Peter Jennings...I thought him the consummate journalist, right up there with Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. Just as I was fiddling with the dial to try to get a better signal, the second tower came down. Peter's voice described the scene and then it broke and the journalist in him gave way to his humanity. There was a dead silence on the airwaves and I thought I heard the sound of thousands of agonized voices crying in their death throes. Just my overactive imagination, but I heard thousands of bodies falling to the ground as their souls rose up to heaven.
At the time, we didn't know how many people were in the building, how many had made their escape. There were estimates of 60,000 people who worked in the two buildings. I'd been to those buildings as a tourist...been up on the observation deck of Building #1. I tried unsuccessfully to imagine that space of sky which those towers had occupied suddenly empty. Perhaps because I was forced to listen and not watch, I had no visual...I couldn't imagine the clouds of dust and smoke occupying that empty space, space which we wouldn't really be able to see for weeks.
I drove home to my house near the national forest, worlds away from the pandemonium of the cities of the East. At the end of my country lane, my dog, Sam stood, looking worriedly up the road. Normally, Sam would be hanging out on our broad front deck, rising to come bounding up to my car to signal his joy at my return. But not that day.
That day, Sam knew...he was a remarkable dog and very attuned to human emotions. But how had he gotten the word that the world was turned upside down that day?
I always left the TV on while I was at work. I used to tease Sam that I would leave the channel on Oprah but that he wasn't to get addicted to the soaps, I didn't want his mind to be corrupted. But of course, that day, there was no Oprah. No Family Feud. Just As the World Turns...it turned 180 degrees that day. Just Peter Jenning's voice and images, infinite in their horror, of flames and people screaming and running and the clouds of dust and smoke and human grief roiling up the streets of Manhattan.
So Sam, being attuned to human emotion, had picked up on the horror of that day and stood at the end of the lane, searching for my car. Sam thought I had somehow been injured in that horror. When I stopped to open my car door, he leapt into my car, licking my face and joyous in his knowledge that, whatever bad had happened that day, it hadn't happened to me.
Except that it did happen to me, and to all of us Americans, wherever Americans live around the world. Our world was no longer safe. I cried into Sam's fur and he licked my tears, making me feel at least a little better.
I can't pretend to understand why extremists hate us, hate the glorious ideals on which our country was founded. No, we aren't and have never been perfect. But we try.
We try to perfect our Constitution through legal means. We amend it to include votes for black men and all women. We give of ourselves and our dollars and our lives for poor and misled peoples throughout the world. No other nation has ever given like Americans give.
Our boots were the first on the ground following the tsunami in Southeast Asia. The first to offer aid to earthquake victims in Chile, Haiti, Pakistan. No, sometimes our aid hasn't always been well distributed and sometimes it has been given for political reasons...but it's given.
We try, however imperfectly, to afford all religions freedom to worship, despite those among us who would deny those freedoms to others.
In the days following 9/11, a tribe of aboriginals in New Zealand sent a herd of cattle to the people of New York. Cattle is currency there and those kind-hearted people, having benefitted from aid from America, wanted to give back to America in the only way they could.
One hundred and forty-seven years ago or so, Lincoln talked about a "more-perfect union"...he recognized that, imperfect though America may be, it is the constant struggle to perfect that sets us apart from every other nation on earth. No, we aren't perfect...will never be.
But we try.
