New Year!. . . 16 days into it already and not a single post. Some of you probably thought I’d fallen off the face of the earth. Not so, just swamped with other things. Still, here I am, back on the job and with some new things to offer at that!
Yesterday evening our President said farewell to the nation. None of the bitter rancor of the Clinton years, none of the long, sappy speeches, none of the nonesense. May I predict that all the Whitehouse furniture and appointments will still be intact after he leaves? President Bush, rather than sarcasm or taking a parting shot, which he could easily have done, chose to focus upon the extraordinary character of the American people, who he has served these past 8 years. He spoke about a 60-year-old doctor from California who lost his son, a Marine, in Iraq, and had requested an exception in order to be inducted into the military medical corps, and about a young Marine who had charged into the fight to save 3 other soldiers, at his own peril. There was the highlight of a former inmate who started a faith-based program to keep people off drugs and out of the crime scene. The specifics aren’t important, they were just the people he thought of, probably because he and Mrs. Bush were having dinner with those people right after the speech.
The remarkable thing about President Bush’s speech was the setting of the stage that occurred earlier in the day. Less than six minutes out of LaGuardia airport with 150 passengers, two pilots and three flight attendants on board, an Airbus A320 headed for Charlotte N.C. suddenly shook and caught fire. Amid the multitude of split second decisions he was making, the pilot keyed the intercom mic and said, “brace for hard impact.” Passengers said his voice was calm and reassuring. My friends who are pilots tell me two things:
1. The first thing you do when you’re in the air is start looking around for a place to set down in case something happens.
2. In the first ten minutes or so a complete power loss is almost certainly going to be disastrous. YOu don’t have enough speed or altitude to pick a good place, and unless a miracle occurs, you’re likely to crash.
And yet, Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger III, Sully to his friends, brought his plane to rest in the middle of the Hudson River, not far from 42nd Street in a water landing that was nothing short of miraculous. The crew cleared the plane immediately through the emergency exits, hustling passengers onto ferry boats that had come to rescue within minutes. There was no panic, very few injuries and some passengers hardly got wet. Captain Sully refused to don a life vest, made two full sweeps of the aircraft’s passenger cabin to be sure everyone was last to leave the planefor safety on the shore.
Commuter ferries operating in the area moved immediately to help passengers as they exited the sinking aircraft, and took them to shore. Rescue boats arrived only minutes later. Police, firefighters, paramedics and just plain folks were among the heroes of the day.
All this underlines, albeit in advance of the speech, what President Bush wanted to say about the exceptional character of American citizens. We are a diverse people from all kinds of backgrounds and ethnicities. And yet none of that matters when there’s an emergency. We cross a broad spectrum of social and economic strata. And yet no questions are asked when the need presents itself. We are sometimes divided by politics, religion, or the lack thereof. And yet, when there’s a life to be saved it is the emergency that takes precedence.
Last night on his radio broadcast Hugh Hewitt spoke of and read a very powerful editorial from Time Magazine referencing another aircraft crash, this one occurring in January of 1982. Written by Roger Rosenblatt, “The Man In The Water” is an incisive and beautifully written comment on the exceptional character of people who put others before themselves. I link it here because it reminds us well of the great need we have to teach character not only to our children, but to those adults among us who have grown up in and are products of the “me first” generation.
Had I been President Bush I might have found it much more difficult to resist a few one-liners, a zinger or two aimed at the folly of political process that so often gets in its own way. But he was too classy for that. It is this kind of class, and a nation framed in freedom by its founders that produces people of extraordinary, exceptional character. Like our president, today I am glad to be an American citizen.
