From Canada's National Post.
September 11, 2001
Emotionally, I'm flying the U.S. flag
Christie Blatchford
National Post -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- My late father loved Americans, as I do. I could hear his voice yesterday, stilled 15 years ago next month, as surely as if he were in the car beside me. "Fuck 'em," he would have said. "Nuke 'em." His generation was not beset, as much of mine is, with the ambivalence engendered by decades of peace. He never had any trouble recognizing the enemy and he wouldn't have any now. Made king of the world, he already would have bombed any nation, and the lair of any group, that had ever done anything to aid or abet Osama bin Laden, the Palestine Liberation Organization or any of the other Islamic terrorist groups. His loyalties were always perfectly clear: America; Britain; Israel; the European allies; Australia and New Zealand. Because I am my era's child, as well as his, I rush to add, he embraced these countries not because they were white -- they weren't, even then -- but because they knew right and had the courage to act on that knowledge. My dad's faith in the Yanks, as he always called them, would be unwavering today, correctly. Canadians know Americans as well as an outsider can, far better than those who unleashed the beast yesterday. To borrow from Winston Churchill in Britain's darkest hour, a half-century ago, we have been on their beaches, we have flown into their landing grounds, we have played in their fields and on their streets. They are our friends, and if as friends do, we have mocked them and caricatured them and been too often too quick to separate ourselves from them in our own pained quest for identity, we know the stuff of which they are made. The people who did this have underestimated them. They have looked upon the most affluent and overweight people in the world, seen softness and not understood that underneath, there is iron and resolve and unfathomable will. They have seen the startling diversity of race and religion and ethnicity and heard the cacophony of voices in that remarkable country, and failed to grasp that beneath the heart of every hyphenated American, there rages the heart of an American, period. You want the best peacetime picture of an American, think of any Olympic Games you can remember. Americans are the most feared athletes on Earth, not because they have the best performance-enhancing drugs (though they may, now); not because they spend the most money; not because they hire the best coaches or have the best programs. Americans win, too many times to count, because they refuse to lose. They thrive on the enormous pressure, especially, and always, before a hometown crowd, or an audience that includes a U.S. president.
Last night, as National Post photographer Chris Bolin and I were driving to New York City, the first flag at half-mast we passed was on the Queen Elizabeth Way, not far from Toronto, at a shoe clearance factory. It was a Canadian flag; I wanted to pull off the road, find the owner, and throw my arms around him.
The first sign for a vigil came in the little border town of Lewiston, N.Y., a few minutes after a pair of U.S. customs officers, still with that odd, trusting American-ness, had glanced at our identification and waved us through.
The sign was taped to the front window of a gas station.
"Join our prayers for our country, our leaders, those injured or bereaved by today's attacks, for the responders who are working to rescue and bring order," it read.
It was a classic piece of Americana -- open as the typical Yank's face; full of faith in God; striking exactly the right tone.
I thought of the day before yesterday, before everything changed forever, and the call-in radio show I'd heard with half an ear. The host was idly debating with his listeners the merits of Canada becoming a part of the United States. People were phoning in to talk about the lure of U.S. lucre, and not much else.
Yesterday morning -- as airplanes were directed into the buildings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and a field, as the wail of sirens from the city that never sleeps played again and again on television sets and radios and ensured that no one would sleep well for days, as the uncounted innocent were slaughtered -- this effectively happened.
In the souls of many of us who consider Americans our friends, the differences between us no longer mattered. The time has come, as the old saying has it, to stick with the guy that brung you. |
