For more than eight years, our family made the trek across the Arizona desert from Los Angeles to Tucson, AZ. It was a ritual that was repeated season after season, year after year, as first our son and then our daughter attended, and then graduated from the University of Arizona. The trip was exactly 530 miles from our driveway to the campus and could take anywhere from seven-and-a-half hours if I was driving alone to 10 hours depending upon who was in the car.
It's not a terribly challenging drive. In fact, all you have to do is point your car into the sun, find the 10 and keep driving until you hit the Speedway off ramp just before the highway bends toward Nogales. Nevertheless, it can be brutal with nothing to look at but miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles! Not very complicated, just tedious: The kind of tedium that finds its way to your eyelids after a few hours.
The terrain is flat and the road is straight, which just adds to the exhaustion as the miles click by. And, after awhile you can just run out of things to say. As a result we accumulated a rather eclectic collection of tapes and CDs over the years: everything from Mozart to Madonna, Garth Brooks and Barbra Streisand to Iron Butterfly and Led Zeppelin. Each passenger had his or her own favorites, and to this day I pride myself on the fact that just about everyone got "equal time."
The kids were into whatever was just about to "pop" on the L.A. music scene, and my folks loved the classic show tunes and the Big Band music of the '40s. My wife is the ultimate Streisand fan, and my tastes run all the way from country to classical. However, there was at least one point in the course of every trip where everyone was forced to listen to a series of classical pieces that started with George Gershwin and ended with Aaron Copland.
I generally elected to take my turn when we were deep into the red hills of the Arizona desert. By that time everyone else in the vehicle had said everything they had to say and listened to everything they wanted to listen to.
For me, at least, Gershwin and Copland painted a musical portrait of America that has never been duplicated. There is an excitement and energy in their music, a kind of adolescent optimism that was this great nation before, during and just after the second World War.
A lot has happened to us as a people since Gershwin wrote "Rhapsody in Blue" and Copland first put the notes to "Fanfare for the Common Man" on paper. A lot has happened to us since 1992 when my son first enrolled at the U of A and 2000 when my daughter graduated. Our nation has changed a great deal, and so have we. Thinking of the post-World War II era in which I have grown up - Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War, depressions, recessions, booms and busts, anti-war protests, stock market bears and bulls, and the sanitary almost antiseptic environment that grows out of our obsession with "political correctness" - I remember wondering ... What they would write today? What would their music sound like? What would it feel like?
For the past 10 years, I was certain that whatever it might be, it wouldn't be the same. But, that was before the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when the course of history as we know it was forever altered, and evil actions and cruel intentions caused us to rediscover who we are and what we are all about.
It seems somehow strangely fitting to be thinking these thoughts and writing these words sitting on an American Airlines 767 luxury liner on my way from LAX to New York's Kennedy International Airport as we climb out of the early morning fog. However, for the past nine days I have been in a fog of my own, staring at my computer, unable to write a single word.
It's not as if I'm suffering from a loss of words; like all of us, I've been drowning in a sea of words since that morning when our nation came under the worst single attack of cowardice and senseless brutality the world may have ever seen. From that moment till now, I have been struggling desperately to make some kind of sense out of the cold-blooded murder of more than 5,000 innocent men, women and children only to ultimately realize that I cannot. Nor, am I sure that anyone else can. From the morning of the 11th on, I have been at war with myself, looking for reason where there can be none.
And, yet, Sept. 11, 2001, was just another "defining" moment in a long list of defining moments that stream through our history one generation to another. Like Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, the beginning of the Korean conflict or the end of the Vietnam War, it staples the tapestry of history to a moment in our lives that is indelibly and forever etched into our consciousness. If you are a survivor of both the Depression and World War II, a part of what Tom Brokaw refers to as "The Greatest Generation," you know exactly where you were and what you were doing the morning of Dec. 7, 1941. Certainly, my parents do.
If you are my age, you can recall exactly where you were and what you were doing when President Kennedy's motorcade made the turn in front of the book depository at Dealey Plaza. And, none of us here today will have any trouble recalling the graphic, almost surreal images of the World Trade Center crumbling into a mountain of rubble ... a tower of shattered glass, bent and broken steel.
I was just sitting down for breakfast that Tuesday when our waitress approached the table looking very concerned. "Don't you have a daughter that lives in Manhattan?"
"Yes, why? "
"Don't you listen to the radio or watch TV when you get up?"
"No."
That was when and how I learned that a commercial jet airliner had just "crashed into Manhattan."
From that moment on nothing has been quite the same - not for me, not for you, not for anyone. Nor, is it likely that things will ever be the same for any of us ever again. The sense of desperation and panic I felt as I ran to the car for my cell phone was overwhelming, but certainly nothing compared to the grief and anguish of those whose husbands or wives, sons or daughters, mothers or fathers, left home for work that Tuesday morning never to return again.
All I wanted was to hear my daughter's voice, to make sure she was out of harm's way and in the 45 minutes that followed, I, we, all of us, have come to realize that the world we once knew is gone.
In a single, striking moment, the challenge of our generation, this generation, had clearly been defined. Other, less immediate concerns would have to wait. War had been declared: unconditional, unrelenting, unavoidable conflict had been brought home to us on our own soil and in our own land. The nature of the assault was equally clear - an attack upon our values, our way of life, upon freedom itself, an assault on everything we hold close. Yet, another test, another measure of our resolve ...
We saw the worst of mankind on the morning of Sept. 11, and at the same moment we were exposed to the very best of America - a portrait of America hidden for far too long. Gazing into that portrait, we learned something very important: that every generation is the greatest generation, that every generation faces its own challenges. We learned that our strength is not the strength of our buildings ... and our economy is not and was not the World Trade Center. And, our enemies are about to learn that our military strength is not an address in Washington, DC.
Our strength is the blue-collar steel that runs through our veins, the spirit of those who preceded us, the vision of their dreams, their passion for freedom, justice and equality. It was the vision of our forefathers, the farmers and merchants who struggled for a new way, a better way, a form of government responsive to the needs of the people rather than a people enslaved by the needs of their government.
America's strength is the courage of New York's firefighters, police and rescue workers who charged into an inferno of twisted wreckage without a thought of their own safety. It is the resolve of those who refuse to give up, who will not quit their grisly work despite the danger, despite the unspeakable horror of what they bear witness to.
We are the New York cab driver from the West Indies, the Middle East or North Africa who works a 12-hour shift to insure a better life for his children. We are bellman or the porter, the doorman or the driver who works two jobs to achieve the American Dream. We are the waitresses and the hostesses, the nurse's aides and the hospital workers who toil endlessly for a different reality, a better reality than they may have been born to. We are the steel workers, the construction workers, the migrant field workers and the office workers who know there is no other place like this.
We are the garage owners and the technicians, the parts store managers, warehouse owners and factory workers who build and install, maintain and repair the cars, trucks, planes and boats that keep this nation moving. We do what has to be done because we understand the impact it has on the world in which we live.
Our strength comes from wave after wave of immigrants from every corner of the globe, people of different faiths, backgrounds and origin. Yet, we are people who share one common dream, the dream of a better tomorrow.
Our enemies see this as our weakness when it is our strength. Where they hear only noise as everyone is allowed to raise their voice in unity or in dissent, we hear a symphony, Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" ...
We are America when we elevate and honor work for work's own sake. We are America when we understand, honor and celebrate our blue-collar heritage.
I wondered for years what America would sound like if Copland or Gerswhin were composing today. After watching the firefighters and the police, the construction workers and the rescue workers from around the world working to dig New York out of the rubble and the wreckage, I know.
We would sound strong, as strong as we have ever sounded. We would sound proud; proud of what we have accomplished, proud of what we have yet to accomplish. We would sound resourceful and resolute, committed and courageous. We would sound like America, and at 35,000 feet, on my way to New York, that sounds pretty good.
