Posted on 09/13/2001 5:54:33 PM PDT by Republicanus_Tyrannus
Tuesday there were many elections taking place all over the United States. Most of them were small, municipal and county elections. Votes were made on subjects ranging from who would be able to claim the candidacy of a particular party for a particular forthcoming election, to the winning of such seats a councilperson or mayor.
But there was one vote taken that was not scheduled. No seat on any city council was up for grabs. No amount of campaign support was at stake. No determination on curfew, noise limits for parties, or whether or not a stop sign was being put up at an intersection was being decided. No scheduled vote was intended to affect the nation as a whole. But one did.
On a speeding aircraft, only partially filled, somewhere over the farms of Pennsylvania, a vote was taken. No other vote count was so heartwrenching. No other question so important was decided in these wide lands by so few. And their franchise claimed such a price, a price no person should ever again be forced to pay.
Three men spoke to their loved ones that day. United Airlines Flight 93 out of Newark was hijacked, and the men heard through their phones that thousands were killed a short time before by two other airliners in New York.
Their response humbles me.
They took a vote.
They voted whether to die resisting the monsters that came into their lives that election day. They voted on whether they would reach out and extinguish death by embracing it - whether they would die to save unknown people, in unknown numbers, somewhere in the morning ahead of them, rushing ever closer.
They took a vote.
And nothing in my life has prepared me to explain how I felt when I read those four words this morning.
They took a vote.
Sometimes you hear of something happening that can not fail to make you stop and swallow with a suddenly choked throat. Out of all this pain, this horror, three men did something that can only be described as 'holy'.
They took a vote, and all I can say is that they won.
Their names were: Mark Bingham, Jeremy GLick, and Thomas E. Burnett.
http://members.tripod.com/~ONAFA/Main.htm
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