A Lost Decade

   "A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of friends."

      George Washington


     A cool, September morning ten years ago, found me rushing to get to ready to go to my 9 o'clock class; Twentieth Century Europe. It was one of those crisp, pre-Fall mornings when you open the windows and pretend Fall is already there. I had spent the morning running in the early morning fog and dew and it seemed like all was right. I got to my apartment, showered, dressed, and was eating breakfast watching the news when everything became not all right. I saw both planes fly into the towers and lost my desire to eat. I walked to my class dazed and zombie-like; what had I just watched? No good answers came to mind. (It seems I am still asking and no good answers have still come up.)
  
    I sat in the upstairs, lone classroom of the Mercer History Department, and acted like I was listening to Dr. Good answer meaningless questions about how the genocide in Darfur was not like the Armenian genocide. A quiet girl in the back asked if we could turn on a t.v. or at least talk about what had just happened. Dr. Good told her no and his reasoning was that he had wasted a whole day on the Oklahoma City bombings and in the end it was just the work of a fringe lunatic and he wasn't going to waste another one. So, we continued to talk about genocide and how they aren't all the same. I still disagree with about everything that was said during those wasted 75 minutes, but now that ten years have passed, I am glad he held us in there; protecting us from what we were about to have to walk out into: a new world where there terror became terrifying and evil took off it's mask and it's face was so much more scarier and worse than that: real.

   The rest of the day is a blur except that at 3 o'clock we had an assembly and I don't remember who spoke or what they said, but what I do remember is what another professor said to me. I sat next to Dr. Klingelhofer and told him how happy I was that I didn't have to get up and say anything and Dr. Klingelhofer told me something I will never forget. He turned sideways in his seat and stared me straight in the eye and said,

     "David, you are a true student of history, right?"
      "Yes, sir. I try to be."
      "I know you are. What happened today is bad, but our country has been through far worse than this. Tomorrow will come and we will be in it and it will need us. Hope is an empty vessel with no one to believe in it. Do you understand?"
       "Yes, sir. Thanks."...

  A full decade has passed and I still wondered and think of it all. It is weird to think that there are children who are walking around that this is all they have known, a country that is till trying to rise from the ash heap, but too irrationally civil and tolerant. The story of the great phoenix of antiquity never tells us how long it took to rise. We have forgotten how to wait. We have forgotten the silver lining in suffering. We have forgotten the taste of hard-earned laurels. We forget that the Revolutionary War lasted 8 years and we came within a fraction of losing. We forget that the Great Depression lasted longer than a year or even ten, that WWII lasted 7 and millions died and that the Civil War lasted 4 and hundreds of thousands of our own countrymen and women died. And that Pearl Harbor was just as frightening or actually even more since a whole nation attacked us, not just a faction from several. 

   I stood at a football game on Friday night and watched a multitude of red, white, and blue balloons and I wept a little. I take this country for granted everyday. I am complacent in my overwhelming freedoms. I don't want it to fly away like those balloons because I was too foolish and let it slide through my fingers. I don't want the next 10 to slip past like these last 10. I know freedom isn't free. I just wish it would cost me and I know that is a scary thought.

  Thank you men and women who protect me and this precious freedom everyday. I wish this didn't sound so cliche because I don't deserve it. You do. You have earned it.

   "We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them."

                          Abigail Adams

David