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Our home-office doesn't have a flagpole, and Martha and I don't have the wherewithal to purchase a few shares of stock to proclaim our faith in America, as some missive circulating on the Internet urged. So we took some other advice from on high, and attempted to go about a normal life last weekend.
That meant doing what we usually do on the third weekend in September: Driving down to Saguache for the town's annual fall festival, and along the way, taking a walk in the woods.
A mile or two this side of Bonanza, we found a side road that led to Brewery Gulch. As soon as we crossed the National Forest boundary, we parked and started walking.
Other people might see skyscrapers and stock exchanges as symbols of what they like about this country, but many other countries have those. America has millions of acres of gorgeous public land that we can just wander through, and in our mountains, that land never looks better than it does in mid-September when the aspen are turning.
The spooky part of that stroll was something we didn't notice at first: the silence overhead. That part of the state -- the general area of Cochetopa Pass -- is quiet anyway. It's so quiet that when we've camped thereabouts, the primary sound we heard at night was the airliners five miles above us.
And now that was missing, though it took us a while to
figure out that for the moment, we weren't in flyover
country.
For a few minutes, as we walked downhill back to our spewt, I allowed myself the luxury of imagining that the federal government, instead of starving Amtrak and subsidizing airlines, decided that the national interest and security would best be served by a modern passenger rail network.
Since there's not much danger that a hijacked train could be used as a weapon of mass destruction, there wouldn't be any reason for three-hour waits engendered by security searches of luggage, and our freedom to travel would be enhanced. Those who absolutely had to fly could put up with the associated indignities, and the rest of us could travel in a civilized manner.
But reality set in as soon as I got back to the radio in the Blazer and they were already talking about how many billions the airlines had lost and how a federal bail-out would be an immediate priority.
So I switched it off, and we got to Saguache where the festival was going strong. Attendance looked about the same as in past years, a band was playing and there were booths offering everything from African beads to local produce.
We ran into some friends who live across the street from the park, Blair Meerfeld and Marty Mitchell. They invited us to stay for dinner with some of their other visiting friends, and pleasant as the evening was, eventually the conversation turned to You Know What.
We agreed that we need a name for what we were calling
the events of last Tuesday
-- a name that won't hold
much longer. The TV networks had settled on Attack on
America,
but there have been many attacks on America,
and already the networks are switching to America
responds
or the like. We can't use geographic
nomenclature like Fort Sumter
or Pearl
Harbor,
since both the Pentagon and the World Trade
Center were attacked.
The best suggestion I've heard to date is from Martha,
who said she heard it somewhere but can't remember where:
Nine-Eleven.
Nine one one
would stay in the
lexicon as the emergency telephone number, but we'd talk
about the Nine-Eleven attack.
This all seems rather trivial, I suppose, but I doubt our conversations were much different than those elsewhere among people who were not directly affected. Aside from a few hotheads who want to betray everything this country should stand for by vandalizing mosques and attacking anyone who wears the wrong kind of headgear, most of us -- 81 percent of the public according to a Wall Street Journal poll -- want to identify the responsible parties with reasonable certainty before retaliating.
We remember the gruesome accounts of Iraqi soldiers ripping Kuwaiti babies out of incubators in 1990 -- and learning later how that was contrived by a Washington public-relations firm. I grew up among patriotic and hard-working Japanese-American families who had moved to Colorado -- not because they wanted to, but because they had been forcibly relocated from the West Coast in 1942.
History recounts how in 1914 the British foreign office
fabricated, for American consumption, stories of the Huns
bayoneting babies in Belgium. We can even Remember the
Maine,
and how President William McKinley was pressured
into going to war with Spain in 1898, even though there has
never been any evidence that the Spanish military had
anything to do with the battleship's sinking in Havana's
harbor.
Patience and skepticism are virtues, never moreso than when emotions understandably run at fever pitch, and that 81 percent figure is one reason to be proud to be an American.
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