The American Spirit Will Never Be Defeated

        Thomas Jefferson clung to life on July 3, 1826. Confined to his bed at Monticello, he fought death, wishing to prolong life by one day, so he could live to see the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

     Jefferson's physician and two grandsons kept an around-the-clock vigil on the dying 83-year-old former third president. ''Is it the fourth?'' Jefferson asked several times as he slipped in and out of consciousness.

       At 9 p.m. on the evening of July 3, Jefferson refused his nightly medicine, saying, ''No, doctor, nothing more.'' His sleep was noticeably more restless and dream-filled. His grandson reported that once Jefferson tried to sit up and eerily mimicked all the motions of writing, saying that the Committee of Safety should be warned, an obvious reference to the days of the American Revolution.

     When Jefferson awoke at 4 a.m. and learned that he had lived to see his glorious Fourth of July, he said, ''Ah, just as I wished.'' In a strong and clear voice, he asked that his family be brought to his room. He bid them all farewell, then lapsed into silence, and with his pulse barely perceptible to the lightest touch, he aroused only twice, requesting water, before passing into the next world at 12:55 p.m., July 4, 1826.

       When I first read the account of Jefferson's last day, I thought it odd that for a life so touched by personal loss, he would relive moments of the American Revolution during his dying hours and not moments with his departed loved ones.

      When Jefferson was 14 years old he lost his father, and a favored older sister died a few years later. His best friend, his beloved wife of only 10 years and his mother all died within a few years of each other. He buried four of his five children and a 35-year-old granddaughter. Yet when he stood on the precipice between life and death, it was the American Revolution he revisited, not the personal touch of a loved one.

      Jefferson and John Adams died that same day, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Many people called it providential, as if God were calling them home after they had successfully fulfilled their destinies, establishing this country and our freedoms.

       Jefferson lived a long and very full life, yet was intrinsically tied to the struggle that created a nation in which all would live free. He was still tied to that struggle during his dying hours.

Sacrifice for Freedom

     I’ve often wondered about the young soldiers whose lives were sacrificed to preserve our freedoms. Fighting in every American war from the Revolution to the current war on terrorism, they traded their young lives and future potential for our safety and freedom. Did that saintly sacrifice intrinsically tie them throughout eternity to our country and our continued struggle to maintain and protect those freedoms?

      I believe in God, heaven, and hell, yet I also believe that there are more things in heaven and earth than man will ever be able to fully understand.

      Albert Einstein said: ''The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But, the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books – a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects."

     Einstein's famous Special Theory of Relativity, published in 1905, overthrew commonsense assumptions about space and time. Relative to the observer, space and time are altered near the speed of light, distances appear to stretch, clocks tick more slowly. Over a decade later, Einstein again challenged conventional wisdom by describing gravity as the warping of spacetime, and not a force acting at a distance. One by one, his theories have been proven, by experiment and observation, to have stood the test of time.

       What if time is not linear, as we suspect, but happening simultaneously on some level or in some aspect which is unseen and unobservable in the present? Then observing the universe through this perspective, could one detect that mysterious order of which Einstein poke?

     Perhaps.

Order From Chaos of September 11

      I perceived a mysterious order out of the terror and chaos of September 11. I don't know if it was born from my desire to ascribe some patriotic value to the uncommon bravery of that day, or whether the tragic events really did parallel historic events. Were events moved by unseen forces? When war rained down upon our citizens, was it accompanied by American patriots from other times and places who are charged throughout eternity to continue in death protecting the country they defended in life?

      Here are my observations:

The American Revolution

      On April 19, 1775, the American Revolution started in the Boston area, the fighting broke out at Concord and Lexington. The North Bridge is where the ''shot heard ‘round the world'' was fired. Two riders, Paul Revere and William Dawes, forewarned the country. America lost 49 soldiers and 39 were wounded, but many were saved by the early warning.

      On Sept. 11, 2001, the American war on terrorism started in the Boston area when two planes, hijacked from Logan Airport, were flown into the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. The first plane hit the north tower, and it was the ''shot heard 'round the world'' in the war on terrorism. The two planes forewarned the Federal Aviation Administration, and all air traffic was grounded. America lost almost 3,000 civilian soldiers and many were wounded, but many others were saved by the early warning from the FAA.

The Whiskey Rebellion

       On July 15, 1794, in southwestern Pennsylvania, Allegheny County, sons of Oliver Miller – William, John and James – were the first farmers fined $250 for not registering their whiskey still. Farmers hated the excise tax, and many refused to register their stills or pay the tax. Whiskey was the main money crop of the frontier farmer and was used as a medium of exchange.

      Shots were fired at the departing federal officers. As word spread over the area, irate farmers demanded the surrender of the commission of Gen. Neville, who led the U.S. marshal to the Miller home. The farmers retreated and regrouped. Maj. James McFarlane led 500 men in the rebellion.

      McFarlane was killed, and Neville's home was burned to the ground.

     President George Washington sent a force of 12,000 soldiers to quell the rebellion, considering this a serious test of the new federal government.

      Americans gained confidence in a government that acted with firmness.

      On Sept. 11, 2001, Flight 93 departed the Newark airport en route to San Francisco. Fifteen minutes into the flight the plane was hijacked by terrorists intending to fly the plane into the White House. Two passengers were killed. As passengers called loved ones on their cell phones, news of the previous planes flown into the World Trade Center spread. Irate passengers planned a rebellion. Terrorists moved 27 passengers to the back of the plane, where they regrouped and planned their attack.

      As Todd Beamer ended a cell call at 9:58 a.m. with the famous words ''Let's roll'' and led a group of passengers down the aisle toward the cockpit, Flight 93 was flying directly above the Oliver Miller estate in western Pennsylvania where farmers fought the Whiskey Rebellion more than 200 years earlier.

     Flight 93 crashed and burned on the ground eight minutes later, less than 80 miles southeast of the Whiskey Rebellion site, in Shanksville, Pa. President Bush put our armed forces on alert, and fighter jets patrolled the skies. Americans gained confidence in the president's firm and clear assessment of the "evil" that threatened us.

D-Day, Omaha Beach

      On June 6, 1944, the 29th Infantry Division, Company A, was part of the first wave of 34,000 soldiers to storm the beach at Normandy, France.

      Their sector on the six-mile beach was called Dog Green, and it was located directly in front of the enemy's position.

     As they approached the landing point, they could hear bullets hitting the metal ramps that were yet to be lowered. Many were weakened from seasickness, and once ashore they had to cover an additional 200 yards of open beach until they reached the seawall. They had devastating fire brought upon them, but the brave young soldiers continued their charge.

       Running into certain death, they reached the beach and found they had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Many returned to the water. Fifteen minutes after landing, Company A's casualties ranged as high as 66 percent.

      On Sept. 11, 2001, every New York City firefighter received the call taking them to the World Trade Center. As they approached the buildings, firefighters could see victims of the disaster jumping to their deaths from the floors above the fires. They knew the situation was deadly, but the brave men rushed in and up into the devastating fires. Running into certain death, they were duty-bound to save others.

      When the buildings began to collapse they had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Within an hour both towers had fallen, and firefighter casualties were devastatingly high.

Raising the American Flag on Iwo Jima

      On Feb. 23, 1945, six members of Easy Company fighting on a tiny Japanese island, one-third the size of Manhattan, climbed the highest point, Mount Suribachi, and planted the American flag. The six flag-raisers were Ira Hayes, Mike Strank, Franklin Sousley, Rene Gagnon, John Bradley, and Harlon Block. Strank, Block, and Sousley would die shortly afterward. Bradley, Hayes, and Gagnon would become national heroes.

       The Americans suffered tremendous losses in the fighting. Of the 310 members of Easy Company, only 50 would return home. They were embattled, but not defeated. The American flag waved.

      On Sept. 13, 2001, three New York firefighters had spent six grueling hours digging in the rubble of the World Trade Center when one spotted an American flag flying from a yacht docked behind the World Financial Center. Firefighter Dan McWilliams from Long Island, along with George Johnson from Rockaway Beach and Billy Eisengrein from Staten Island, raised the American flag on a single flagpole anchored in the rubble.

      The men were celebrated, and the picture represented America's strength and resolution: Americans suffered tremendous loses in the terrorist attack.

About the Writer: Joan Marie Nagy is a freelance writer in Pennsylvania. Joan Marie receives e-mail at JoanMarie@Nagy.com.

Another writer on 9/11. Written before 9/11. Bears rereading, if you've never seen it.

There Is No Time,
There Will Be Time
We live in such unprecedented comfort! But can it last?

Tuesday, September 18, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

(Editor's note: In the summer of 1998 Ms. Noonan wrote this essay for the magazine Forbes ASAP. It was published in the Nov. 30, 1998 issue, devoted to the subject of time--how we experience time, how modern men and women relate to it in ways that might be different from our predecessors. Ms. Noonan has received many requests for reprints since the events in New York the past week. She loves Forbes ASAP too but thought most of her readers were more likely to find it here.)

I suppose it is commonplace to say it, but it's true: There is no such thing as time. The past is gone and no longer exists, the future is an assumption that has not yet come, all you have is the moment--this one--but it too has passed . . . just now. The moment we are having is an awfully good one, though. History has handed us one of the easiest rides in all the story of man. It has handed us a wave of wealth so broad and deep that it would be almost disorienting if we thought about it a lot, which we don't.

But: We know such comfort! We sleep on beds that are soft and supporting, eat food that is both good and plentiful. We touch small levers and heat our homes to exactly the degree we desire; the pores of our bare arms are open and relaxed as we read the Times in our T-shirts, while two feet away, on the other side of the plate glass window, a blizzard rages. We turn levers and get clean water, push a button for hot coffee, open doors and get ice cream, take short car trips to places where planes wait before whisking us across continents as we nap. It is all so fantastically fine.

Lately this leaves me uneasy. Does it you? Do you wonder how and why exactly we have it so different, so nice compared to thousands of years of peasants eating rocks? Is it possible that we, the people of the world, are being given a last great gift before everything changes? To me it feels like a gift. Only three generations ago, my family had to sweat in the sun to pull food from the ground.

Another thing. The marvels that are part of our everyday lives--computers, machines that can look into your body and see everything but your soul--are so astounding that most of us who use them don't really understand exactly what they're doing or how they do it. This too is strange. The day the wheel was invented, the crowd watching understood immediately what it was and how it worked. But I cannot explain with any true command how the MRI that finds a tumor works. Or how, for that matter, the fax works.

We would feel amazement, or even, again, a mild disorientation, if we were busy feeling and thinking long thoughts instead of doing--planning the next meeting, appointment, consultation, presentation, vacation. We are too busy doing these things to take time to see, feel, parse, and explain amazement.

Which gets me to time.

We have no time! Is it that way for you? Everyone seems so busy. Once, a few years ago, I sat on the Spanish Steps in Rome. Suddenly I realized that everyone, all the people going up and down the steps, was hurrying along on his or her way somewhere. I thought, Everyone is doing something. On the streets of Manhattan, they hurry along and I think, Everyone is busy. I don't think I've seen anyone amble, except at a summer place, in a long time. I am thinking here of a man I saw four years ago at a little pier in Martha's Vineyard. He had plaid shorts and white legs, and he was walking sort of stiffly, jerkily. Maybe he had mild Parkinson's, but I think: Maybe he's just arrived and trying to get out of his sprint and into a stroll.

All our splendor, our comfort, takes time to pay for. And affluence wants to increase; it carries within it an unspoken command: More! Affluence is like nature, which always moves toward new life. Nature does its job; affluence enlists us to do it. We hear the command for "More!" with immigrant ears that also hear "Do better!" or old American ears that hear, "Sutter is rich, there's gold in them hills, onward to California!" We carry California within us; that is what it is to be human, and American.

So we work. The more you have, the more you need, the more you work and plan. This is odd in part because of all the spare time we should have. We don't, after all, have to haul water from the crick. We don't have to kill an antelope for dinner. I can microwave a Lean Cuisine in four minutes and eat it in five. I should have a lot of extra time--more, say, than a cavewoman. And yet I feel I do not. And I think: That cavewoman watching the antelope turn on the spit, she was probably happily daydreaming about how shadows played on the walls of her cave. She had time.

It's not just work. We all know the applications of Parkinson's Law, that work expands to fill the time allotted to complete it. This isn't new. But this is: So many of us feel we have no time to cook and serve a lovely three-course dinner, to write the long, thoughtful letter, to ever so patiently tutor the child. But other generations, not so long ago, did. And we have more timesaving devices than they did.

We invented new technologies so that work could be done more efficiently, more quickly. We wished it done more quickly so we could have more leisure time. (Wasn't that the plan? Or was it to increase our productivity?)

But we have less leisure time, it seems, because these technologies encroach on our leisure time.

You can be beeped on safari! Be faxed while riding an elephant and receive e-mail while being menaced by a tiger. And if you can be beeped on safari, you will be beeped on safari. This gives you less time to enjoy being away from the demands of time.

Twenty years ago when I was starting out at CBS on the radio desk, we would try each day to track down our roving foreign correspondents and get them to file on the phone for our morning news broadcasts. I would go to the daily log to see who was where. And not infrequently it would say that Smith, in Beirut, is "out of pocket," i.e., unreachable, unfindable for a few days. The official implication was that Smith was out in the field traveling with the guerrillas. But I thought it was code for "Smith is drunk," or "Smith is on deep background with a really cute source." I'd think, Oh, to be an out-of-pocket correspondent on the loose in Cairo, Jerusalem, Paris--what a thing.

But now there is no "out of pocket." Now everyone can be reached and found, anywhere, anytime. Now there is no hiding place. We are "in the pocket."

What are we in the pocket of? An illusion, perhaps, or rather many illusions: that we must know the latest, that we must have a say, that we are players, are needed, that the next score will change things, that through work we can quench our thirst, that, as they said in the sign over the entrance of Auschwitz, "Work Brings Freedom," That we must bow to "More!" and pay homage to California. I live a life of only average intensity, and yet by 9 p.m. I am quite stupid, struck dumb with stimuli fatigue. I am tired from 10 hours of the unconscious strain of planning, meeting, talking, thinking. If you clench your fist for 10 hours and then let go, your hand will jerk and tremble. My brain trembles.

I sit on the couch at night with my son. He watches TV as I read the National Enquirer and the Star. This is wicked of me, I know, but the Enquirer and the Star have almost more pictures than words; there are bright pictures of movie stars, of television anchors, of the woman who almost choked to death when, in a state of morning confusion, she accidentally put spermicidal jelly on her toast. These stories are just right for the mind that wants to be diverted by something that makes no demands.

I have time at 9. But I am so flat-lined that I find it very hard to make the heartening phone call to the nephew, to write the long letter. Often I feel guilty and treat myself with Haagen-Dazs therapy. I will join a gym if I get time.

When a man can work while at home, he will work while at home. When a man works at home, the wall between workplace and living place, between colleague and family, is lowered or removed. Does family life spill over into work life? No. Work life spills over into family life. You do not wind up taking your son for a walk at work, you wind up teleconferencing during softball practice. This is not progress. It is not more time but less. Maybe our kids will remember us as there but not there, physically present but carrying the faces of men and women who are strategizing the sale.

I often think how much I'd like to have a horse. Not that I ride, but I often think I'd like to learn. But if I had a horse, I would be making room for the one hour a day in which I would ride. I would be losing hours seeing to Flicka's feeding and housing and cleaning and loving and overall well being. This would cost money. I would have to work hard to get it. I would have less time.

Who could do this? The rich. The rich have time because they buy it. They buy the grooms and stable keepers and accountants and bill payers and negotiators for the price of oats. Do they enjoy it? Do they think, It's great to be rich, I get to ride a horse?

Oh, I hope so! If you can buy time, you should buy it. This year I am going to work very hard to get some.

II
During the summer, when you were a kid, your dad worked a few towns away and left at 8:30; Mom stayed home smoking and talking and ironing. You biked to the local school yard for summer activities--twirling, lanyard making, dodgeball--until afternoon. Then you'd go home and play in the street. At 5:30 Dad was home and at 6 there was dinner--meat loaf, mashed potatoes and canned corn. Then TV and lights out.

Now it's more like this: Dad goes to work at 6:15, to the city, where he is an executive; Mom goes to work at the bank where she's a vice president, but not before giving the sitter the keys and bundling the kids into the car to go to, respectively, soccer camp, arts camp, Chinese lessons, therapy, the swim meet, computer camp, a birthday party, a play date. Then home for an impromptu barbecue of turkey burgers and a salad with fresh Parmesan cheese followed by summer homework, Nintendo, and TV --the kids lying splayed on the couch, dead eyed, like denizens of a Chinese opium den--followed by "Hi Mom," "Hi, Dad," and bed.

Life is so much more interesting now! It's not boring, like 1957. There are things to do: The culture is broader, more sophisticated; there's more wit and creativity to be witnessed and enjoyed. Moms, kids and dads have more options, more possibilities. This is good. The bad news is that our options leave us exhausted when we pursue them and embarrassed when we don't.

Good news: Mothers do not become secret valium addicts out of boredom and loneliness, as they did 30 and 40 years ago. And Dad's conversation is more interesting than his father's. He knows how Michael Jordan acted on the Nike shoot, and tells us. The other night Dad worked late and then they all went to a celebratory dinner at Rao's where they sat in a booth next to Warren Beatty, who was discussing with his publicist the media campaign for "Bulworth." Beatty looked great, had a certain watchful dignity, ordered the vodka penne.

Bad news: Mom hasn't noticed but she's half mad from stress. Her face is older than her mother's, less innocent, because she has burned through her facial subcutaneous fat and because she unconsciously holds her jaw muscles in a tense way. But it's okay because the collagen, the Botox, the Retin-A and alpha hydroxy, and a better diet than her mother's (Grandma lived on starch, it was the all-carbo diet) leave her looking more . . . fit. She does not have her mother's soft, maternal weight. The kids do not feel a pillowy yielding when they hug her; they feel muscles and smell Chanel body moisturizer.

When Mother makes fund-raising calls for the school, she does not know it but she barks: "Yeah, this is Claire Marietta on the cookie drive we need your cookies tomorrow at 3 in the gym if you're late the office is open till 4 or you can write a check for $12 any questions call me." Click.

Mom never wanted to be Barbara Billingsley. Mom got her wish.

III
What will happen? How will the future play out?

Well, we're going to get more time. But it's not pretty how it will happen, so if you're in a good mood, stop reading here and go hug the kids and relax and have a drink and a nice pointless conversation with your spouse.

Here goes: It has been said that when an idea's time has come a lot of people are likely to get it at the same time. In the same way, when something begins to flicker out there in the cosmos a number of people, a small group at first, begin to pick up the signals. They start to see what's coming.

Our entertainment industry, interestingly enough, has plucked something from the unconscious of a small collective. For about 30 years now, but accelerating quickly this decade, the industry has been telling us about The Big Terrible Thing. Space aliens come and scare us, nuts with nukes try to blow us up.

This is not new: In the '50s Michael Rennie came from space to tell us in "The Day the Earth Stood Still" that if we don't become more peaceful our planet will be obliterated. But now in movies the monsters aren't coming close, they're hitting us directly. Meteors the size of Texas come down and take out the eastern seaboard, volcanoes swallow Los Angeles, Martians blow up the White House. The biggest-grosser of all time was about the end of a world, the catastrophic sinking of an unsinkable entity.

Something's up. And deep down, where the body meets the soul, we are fearful. We fear, down so deep it hasn't even risen to the point of articulation, that with all our comforts and amusements, with all our toys and bells and whistles . . . we wonder if what we really have is . . . a first-class stateroom on the Titanic. Everything's wonderful, but a world is ending and we sense it.

I don't mean: "Uh-oh, there's a depression coming," I mean: We live in a world of three billion men and hundreds of thousands of nuclear bombs, missiles, warheads. It's a world of extraordinary germs that can be harnessed and used to kill whole populations, a world of extraordinary chemicals that can be harnessed and used to do the same.

Three billion men, and it takes only half a dozen bright and evil ones to harness and deploy.

What are the odds it will happen? Put it another way: What are the odds it will not? Low. Nonexistent, I think.

When you consider who is gifted and crazed with rage . . . when you think of the terrorist places and the terrorist countries . . . who do they hate most? The Great Satan, the United States. What is its most important place? Some would say Washington. I would say the great city of the United States is the great city of the world, the dense 10-mile-long island called Manhattan, where the economic and media power of the nation resides, the city that is the psychological center of our modernity, our hedonism, our creativity, our hard-shouldered hipness, our unthinking arrogance.

If someone does the big, terrible thing to New York or Washington, there will be a lot of chaos and a lot of lines going down, a lot of damage, and a lot of things won't be working so well anymore. And thus a lot more . . . time. Something tells me we won't be teleconferencing and faxing about the Ford account for a while.

The psychic blow--and that is what it will be as people absorb it, a blow, an insult that reorders and changes--will shift our perspective and priorities, dramatically, and for longer than a while. Something tells me more of us will be praying, and hard, one side benefit of which is that there is sometimes a quality of stopped time when you pray. You get outside time.

Maybe, of course, I'm wrong. But I think of the friend who lives on Park Avenue who turned to me once and said, out of nowhere, "If ever something bad is going to happen to the city, I pray each day that God will give me a sign. That He will let me see a rat stand up on the sidewalk. So I'll know to gather the kids and go." I absorbed this and, two years later, just a month ago, poured out my fears to a former high official of the United States government. His face turned grim. I apologized for being morbid. He said no, he thinks the same thing. He thinks it will happen in the next year and a half. I was surprised, and more surprised when he said that an acquaintance, a former arms expert for another country, thinks it will happen in a matter of months.

So now I have frightened you. But we must not sit around and be depressed. "Don't cry," Jimmy Cagney once said. "There's enough water in the goulash already."

We must take the time to do some things. We must press government officials to face the big, terrible thing. They know it could happen tomorrow; they just haven't focused on it because there's no Armageddon constituency. We should press for more from our foreign intelligence and our defense systems, and press local, state, and federal leaders to become more serious about civil defense and emergency management.

The other thing we must do is the most important.

I once talked to a man who had a friend who'd done something that took his breath away. She was single, middle-aged and middle class, and wanted to find a child to love. She searched the orphanages of South America and took the child who was in the most trouble, sick and emotionally unwell. She took the little girl home and loved her hard, and in time the little girl grew and became strong, became in fact the kind of person who could and did help others. Twelve years later, at the girl's high school graduation, she won the award for best all-around student. She played the piano for the recessional. Now she's at college.

The man's eyes grew moist. He had just been to the graduation. "These are the things that stay God's hand," he told me. I didn't know what that meant. He explained: These are the things that keep God from letting us kill us all.

So be good. Do good. Stay his hand. And pray. When the Virgin Mary makes her visitations--she's never made so many in all of recorded history as she has in this century--she says: Pray! Pray unceasingly!

I myself don't, but I think about it a lot and sometimes pray when I think. But you don't have to be Catholic to take this advice.

Pray. Unceasingly. Take the time.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "The Case Against Hillary Clinton" (Regan Books, 2000). Her weekly column will return soon.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.