In Spanish bullfighting, the greatest demonstration of
bravery is to turn your back on the bull.
Take a wild animal, anger it with physical abuse, humiliate it with a
display of senseless domination, bloody it to the point of diminished capacity,
then turn to the cheering crowd, proving to the bull that he no longer poses a
threat. This great tradition of man’s
supremacy over beast brings admiring throngs to their feet in admiration.
Sadly, our heroes are commonly made in the wake of bloody
spoils, hoisted upon an altar of violence or greed. It is a regrettable failing of ours as humans
that to achieve our own success we must do so at the expense of others. Thus we spend our efforts—whether
economically or militarily —trying to redistribute the pie rather than making
it bigger. Your loss is my gain. It is the reason why history continues to
repeat itself.
These are my reflections on this most somber of days,
September 11th. On this
particular day, I have boarded a morning plane from Boston to California, much
the same as hundreds of people did eleven years ago. Logan Airport was unusually quiet this
morning. Absent was the usual
electricity of business travelers, filled with a sense of purpose and
urgency. I saw no families corralling their
broods of small children with promises of Disneyworld or Grandma’s house. Security was high while the volume of
travelers was low. It is a good day to
travel; it is a bad day to travel.
As I write, I am in the air at high altitude. The mood on board is subdued. Passengers leaf through a variety of
newspapers; the headlines declare in bold print what no one will acknowledge
openly. I can sense the pain and the
sadness that lingers even now after a more than a decade. It is a wound that never heals. It is a memory that remains in the collective
conscience, bonding all of us on board.
We are strangers; we are brothers.
For the first time in my history as an air traveler—I am a
Million Miler on Delta—the boarding was accomplished in a quiet and orderly
fashion. No one rushed the counter or
pushed ahead of others. Everyone waited
patiently for their “zone” to be called.
A handful of passengers approached the check-in counter to request their
oversize carry-on bags to be gate-checked.
We were boarded at full capacity
a full fifteen minutes before flight time.
The door was closed and the plane pushed back with five minutes to
spare.
Caught as I was between family and business commitments, I
had little choice about traveling on this day.
Months ago, as I worked out the logistics of this busy week, the date
gave me pause. All things being equal, I
might have chosen differently. Then I
realized that it would be wrong to fashion a series of unnatural acts to avoid
what needed to be done. We need to take
back this day. We need to live and work
and serve and play, perhaps with heightened awareness but not with a sense of
defeat or retreat.
September 11th, 2001 is one of those days—like
the day JFK was shot—where I will always remember what I was doing. I was talking with another baseball mom when
she said “Hang up the phone right now and turn on the television. Just do it.
Now.” I was just in time to see
the second plane hit the towers. I
remember the shock at viewing the incomprehensible scene before me. It had not been long since we had met some
friends in New York and taken our families to Windows on the World. Dumbfounded,
I busied myself calling and emailing every single person I knew living and
working in New York. In some cases, it
took hours to hear back and account for everyone. In retrospect, it was a silly exercise, but
it was all I could think to do with the helplessness that filled my being. Everyone I spoke to seemed to feel the same
way: glad for the human contact and
relieved to be able to express their own sense of horror and sadness.
It is a token effort that I make as I sit on this
flight. My nerves are on end, yet I am
proud to be flying like it is any other day.
It may be the “new” normal, but it feels normal nonetheless. And today, that is a small victory that comes
at no one’s expense.
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