You will have a slate of aspiring public officials to choose from who can hold the US government accountable. Don’t focus solely on your pick for the nation’s highest office and play roulette with the rest of the candidates running for the US Senate, the House, state offices, and so on. You must consider which of these people are ready to lead. Are they prepared to keep the president and our executive branch in check? Will they be unafraid to speak the truth? Do they have the honorableness and decency that have become endangered traits in today’s politics? If we exercise good judgment on the rest of the ballot we can better protect our country’s institutions and its future.
No matter what happens on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, Americans have another pressing review to conduct. It’s bigger than a presidential election. This particular duty doesn’t involve weighing individual candidates, or anyone running for public office for that matter. The task at hand is to judge someone far more important than the commander in chief, someone who will be illuminated by the national spotlight whether or not Donald Trump is reelected. Ourselves. The time has come to assess the civic fault lines spreading across our republic. The character of one man has widened the chasms of American political division, but if any good comes from the turmoil, hopefully it will be that it causes us to reinvestigate—and reinvigorate—the character of our nation.
EPILOGUE
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
“Let’s roll.” Those were Todd Beamer’s final words before he set down the phone.
Todd was an account manager for a computer company, and his early-morning business trip came on the heels of a five-day vacation in Italy. He and his wife had just returned the night before. Rather than take off immediately to his next destination, he spent the evening at home with her and their two children.
Now Todd was midair on the way from Newark to San Francisco, and his plane had just been hijacked.
About forty-five minutes into the flight, four men stormed the cockpit, slitting the throats of the pilots and taking over the aircraft. One of them made an announcement over the intercom in broken English: “Ladies and gentlemen: here the captain. Please sit down, keep remaining seating. We have a bomb on board. So sit.”
They herded passengers into the rear of the jet and banked back toward the East Coast.
Todd tried to use the seat phone and was connected with Lisa Jefferson, a call center representative for the in-flight phone company. He calmly described the scene for her to relay to authorities. The men had knives out. One appeared to have a bomb strapped to his body. The pilots were lying motionless on the floor. A fellow passenger had been killed.
Todd’s seatmates received word via calls to loved ones that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been struck by hijacked airplanes. The passengers and crew huddled to discuss the situation. They didn’t want to be the next aircraft flown into a target, so they took a vote and agreed to retake the cockpit.
Todd informed Lisa, who was still on the line, that they planned to wrest control of the plane back from the hijackers. He asked her to do him a favor. If he didn’t survive, he wanted her to call his wife with a message: “Tell her I love her and the boys.” She promised she would, but what Todd would never know was that his wife was pregnant with a baby girl, too. He recited the Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 23.
“You ready?” he asked fellow passengers. “Okay. Let’s roll.”
They rushed the front of the plane. A few minutes later, after a struggle in the cockpit, United Flight 93 crashed into an open field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, about twenty minutes flying time from Washington, DC. All souls onboard perished.
The story of Flight 93 filled Americans with solemn pride in the painful days after the attacks of September 11, 2001. In the face of terror, the passengers displayed moving bravery. These everyday heroes undoubtedly saved many lives, diverting an airplane before it could become a missile, one that was reportedly bound for the US Capitol Building. Theirs was the true American spirit, and it far eclipsed the cowardice that briefly controlled the skies that fateful morning. In the aftermath, the words of Todd Beamer became a rallying cry for a more united country.
Most recall the months after 9/11 as a period of patriotic renewal in the United States. We flew flags outside our homes. We held our families closer. We felt an unspoken connection to strangers like never before—simply because they were fellow Americans. The sudden embrace of unity over division was not inevitable, as less than a year earlier the nation was split by one of the most fiercely contested elections in history. But after the attacks, we consciously put aside our differences, a collective act facilitated in part by a president’s unifying rhetoric. In an address before Congress on September 20, 2011, President Bush stoked the embers of a common bond, telling Americans we would come together against the threat of violence from terrorists. “We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.”
Now imagine the scenario played out differently. Pretend that instead of resolve, Bush expressed skepticism after 9/11. Imagine that, as smoke rose from the Twin Towers, he questioned whether al-Qaeda really orchestrated the attacks; he dismissed the intelligence community’s conclusions as “ridiculous”; he suggested the hijackers on Todd Beamer’s flight could have been from “a lot of different groups”; he fanned the flames of conspiracy theory by calling the incident a “hoax” and a “ruse”; he declared at a press conference, “Osama bin Laden says it’s not al-Qaeda. I don’t see why it would be,” in response to increasingly irrefutable evidence of the terror group’s responsibility; and he urged Americans that it would be a mistake to go after al-Qaeda because the United States had the potential for a “great relationship” with them. If that’s what Bush had done, the political explosion would have torn the country to shreds.
That’s effectively what happened when the United States was attacked in 2016. This time, the hijackers were hackers, and the president was Donald Trump. After Russia’s deliberate and coordinated assault on US democratic elections, recall that Trump downplayed the incident and dismissed the intelligence community’s conclusions; he questioned whether the interference was perpetrated by Moscow; he speculated that others could have been behind it; he promoted conspiracy theories; he said he believed Putin’s word that Russia was not responsible; and he suggested it would be a mistake for the United States to ruin the possibility of a good relationship with Moscow over the matter. The collective national reaction was not the patriotism, unity, and resolve of 9/11. It was internal conflict, and in the meantime, the Russians got away with it.
The two attacks reveal a lot about our choices. In both cases our enemies wanted to spark chaos in our democracy. In both cases we had the option to let them, or not. I wish the passengers of Flight 93 could have seen the influence of their example upon the country in the first instance—how their courage on 9/11 became a metaphor for American determination. They would have been proud that we chose to come together rather than allow terrorism to rip us apart. I also suspect they would be dismayed to witness our equal capacity for divisiveness not even two decades after their noble sacrifice.