In March of 1981, I was sick enough to stay home from school. Mom had made plans to visit a friend, and when it comes to laying on a couch with a box of tissues & a bottle of cough syrup, a friend’s couch is the same as the one at home. One of the big songs at the time was ‘Call Me’ by Blondie, and whatever was on the TV was suddenly interrupted with breaking news: President Reagan had been shot.
They say you remember where you were when such events of national interest occur. In this aspect, ‘they’ are right. Mom was having flashbacks of when we lost JFK, Bobby, and Martin Luther King. These were momentous, and she remembers vividly.
Almost five years later, January 1986, I was walking through the college dorm lobby. The TV was set to live coverage of another space shuttle launch. It had become rather old hat, but I made the choice to pause anyway. There was the countdown, the liftoff, and the braces falling away as the shuttle broke free of the launch pad. It was starting into its arc, and I was turning away to attend class, when suddenly the white spot on the screen, and the people within it, were no more.
Nearly ten years later, April 1995, I had been medically advised that ‘pushing through fatigue’ would be counterproductive. I was having a very rough morning, and took advantage of the opportunity to use paid sick leave. Moving from bed to couch, I turned on the TV and was struck by images & reports of the destruction of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. I have a personal connection to a lady whose two daughters were in the childcare center that morning. An appointment that usually took more than an hour was quickly settled, and she & the girls were on the freeway 10 minutes away when disaster struck. Many, too many, lost their lives for reasons we still haven’t discovered, yet a few were providentially moved to safety.
Six years went by, with some unthinkable events that replaced the phrase “going postal” with the phrase “school shooting”. These shouldn’t mean what they do, and the second shouldn’t even exist, but in our world, it does. Debates, sparked by the Reagan assassination attempt in 1981, have gone to fever pitch and higher, with no good solutions to the problem. There aren’t any, until we realize that the problem is a matter of character, and the tools & scope of murder are just details. The first recorded homicide was well before automated projectiles – a brother killed his brother with his bare hands, over a matter of perceived disrespect.
2001, September…my parents had taken a trip to Hawaii to celebrate Dad’s birthday, and I still haven’t stopped giving thanks. It was another rough morning and I was still driving when I would regularly have been at my desk. The radio news clip stated a plane had crashed into an office building in New York. I cared for the unfortunate pilot of a small misguided plane, believing a private Cesna had veered fatally off course. As I rounded an exit ramp off 270, the music was interrupted with an announcement that a second plane had crashed into a second building, and I knew with sickening clarity that a deliberate attack was underway. The Pentagon, then a plan thwarted over Pennsylvania, led me directly to the knowledge that my parents were providentially safe – their worksite was surely on the list of targets. There are many stories of people who were ill, or delayed, or otherwise prevented from being in the paths of death that day. We don’t always get such clear reminders that every human breath and heartbeat is in the hands of God.
It was a strange day, and included a moment when I looked a dedicated Muslim man in the eye and asked “does your god demand this of you?”. It wasn’t my most gracious moment, but to his credit, he handled it well. He was as deeply affected by the tragedy as the rest of us, genuinely in shock and bracing himself to take unfair blame. We had a business meeting in the afternoon, someone actually believed we could concentrate on details of the project while we were grieving, stressing, and seeing news reports on the tv in the restaurant where we gathered, our lunches barely touched.
One of our team had been a schoolmate of Flight 93’s celebrated hero, Todd Beamer. They attended Wheaton College, a Christian school, and the alma mater of martyred missionary Jim Elliot. Jim Elliot and his team, having at least one gun available on that fateful day in 1956, had made and stood by their decision to not fire on the natives if attacked. The men knew they were ready to cross into eternity, and the natives were not. Todd and the others aboard Flight 93 made a similarly suicidal choice, in order to save countless lives in another place – lives in imminent danger due to the faith-induced actions of others. If a man’s faith forms his character, 9/11 has much to say about extremes and stark contrast in core beliefs.
‘They’ assert that religion and/or accessible weaponry are the core problems that need to be addressed. I disagree that civil legislation can do anything to countermand humans dedicated to their intended course of action. There is one point, however, that ‘they’ are right on: some moments make an impression so deep that you never forget the surrounding details.