Five years ago and a few months before That Day, in an earlier version of this weblog, I posted a link to Stephen Jay Gould's essay on the arrival of his grandfather in this country, on Sept. 11, 1901. Exactly one hundred years later, September 11 was to have been a day of remembrance for Gould, who was en route to New York City, intending to visit Ellis Island. We all know what happened.
Today, perhaps we need to recall the real decency and heroism of those who were there in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center. Stepehn Jay Gould was among those people: "Sept. 11, 1901."
"My native city of New York, and the whole world, suffered grievously on September 11, 2001. But Papa Joe's message of September 11, 1901, properly generalized across billions of people, will triumph through the agency of ordinary human decency. We have landed. Lady Liberty still lifts her lamp beside the golden door. And that door leads to the greatest, and largely successful, experiment in democracy ever attempted in human history, upheld by basic goodness across the broadest diversity of ethnicities, economies, geographies, languages, customs and employments that the world has ever known as a single nation. We fought our bloodiest war to keep our motto, e pluribus unum (one from many), as a vibrant reality. We will win now because ordinary humanity holds a triumphant edge of millions of good people over each evil psychopath. But we will only prevail if we mobilize this latent goodness into permanent vigilence and action. Verse seven [of Ecclesiastes] epitomizes our necessary course of action at my Papa Joe's centennial: 'A time to rend, and at a time to sew: a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.'"
And today, living not just in the shadow of those fallen skyscrapers, we Americans live with a profoundly irresponsible regime which, exploiting with lies and cruelty the deaths of those who died on this day five years ago, seeks at every turn to plant in the hearts and minds of many the seeds of racism and xenophobia. They are succeeding. Not only will this regime build in the name of fighting "terrorism" a physical wall to keep out Mexican migrants seeking work and escape from the evil of poverty for themselves and their families--people the same as Papa Joe and his sisters, who came here with little besides the clothes on their backs--this regime will build--are building--a wall of fear and hatred around this country, a wall that will not be so easy to tear down. Unless we stop them.
So let us not forget the lives lost to madness on Sept. 11, 2001. And let us not forget Papa Joe. Indeed "Lady Liberty still lifts her lamp beside the golden door." And the words of Emma Lazarus are still engraved at her feet. Let us not forget those words, either.
