Reflections & Observations

This Strange Land

   As 2001 rolled out, George W. Bush took office –- under a cloud. He lost the popular vote to Al Gore, Florida couldn’t seem to figure out how to count votes, much less actually count them, and the Supreme Court proved itself less than supreme when it arbitrarily shut down the Florida count and awarded the White House to Bush. It was a less than propitious start for both the year and the new president. Then the economy, which had boomed for eight years, tripped over a surfeit of dot-coms, stumbled and went into decline.
   But all of that and everything else that had happened in what seemed to be the hopelessly trivial, materialistic, empty-eyed 21st century, indeed the new millennium itself, vaporized – with a portion of New York — on September 11.
   On September 11, 2001, for the first time since 1941, an enemy force launched an assault on American soil and American civilians, destroying a piece of New York and a piece of the Pentagon, killing thousands of people and obliterating virtually all the usual American assumptions.
   An airliner crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers. Another airliner crashed into the second tower. The towers fell. A third airliner crashed into the Pentagon. A fourth airliner crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. The entire country, and much of the world, was holding its breath, waiting for the next blow…and the next.
   It was literally incomprehensible. Not only could we not believe what we were seeing on our television screens, we didn’t know who was attacking us, or why. All we knew was that American airliners were flying into American landmarks and Americans were dying and our world was falling down.
   Three months later, we know more. We know who did it and how they did it and why they did it, or we think we do. But we don’t know much else.
   We remain strangers in a strange land. On September 10, America was not simply the most powerful nation in the world; it was the most powerful nation the world had ever known. It was invulnerable. Even if another country could attack us, it wouldn’t dare. On September 11, America was still the most powerful nation the world had ever known, but it was not invulnerable. Nineteen terrorists in hijacked airliners had done what no nation had dared to do.
   We are more serious now, more devoted – to our families and friends and to our country. The trivial pursuits that once engaged us seem mildly obscene now. Our new heroes are firefighters and cops and the heartbreakingly young soldiers, sailors and Marines who are off battling the terrorists.
   But something ugly has surfaced, too. Recently, during commencement ceremonies at Cal State Sacramento, Janis Besler Heaphy, publisher of the Sacramento Bee, was driven off the stage midway through a nine-minute speech for, in the words of the New York Times, “calling for the protection of civil liberties in the government’s response to terrorism.
   “When she urged that citizens safeguard their rights to free speech against unlawful detainment and for a fair trial, she was booed. When she wondered what would happen if racial profiling became routine, the audience cheered…Just as she argued that ‘the Constitution makes it our right to challenge government policies,’ a clapping chant and further heckling forced her off the stage.”
   University president Donald R. Gerth said, “I’ve been a university president for 28 years and I’ve never seen anything like what happened.”
   He also said that nothing in the speech diverged from a basic American civics lesson, adding, “It is not only thoughtful, but extremely responsible.”
   The people who forced Heaphy off the stage probably see themselves as patriots, but, of course, the real American patriots are the people – from George Washington to the young people now serving in Afghanistan – who have fought, and sometimes died, to preserve our civil liberties, including free speech.
   In fact, Heaphy’s defeat was a victory for this country’s enemies. A great many Americans are angry and fearful now, with good reason, but when that anger and fear is directed at people who are simply exercising their freedom of speech and defending the Constitution, it plays right into the hands of people who would destroy us.
   The great abiding American irony is that if Heaphy, and countless other Americans, didn’t defend our civil liberties, the people who drove her off the stage, and countless others like them, would be rounded up and jailed for exercising their right to express themselves freely.