A CALL FOR REASON
The adversary has not won. He has not, as he had hoped, come
even close to crippling our society and breaking our spirit.
America and its people are far greater and stronger than his small
and diseased mind can fathom. He cannot win—unless
we let him. If he should
provoke us to lower ourselves to his level, if he
should goad us into avenging his acts of blind hatred
with rash and misdirected acts of our own, if he
should incite us to renounce our standards of liberty
and justice, if he should trick us into victimizing
each other, then we will disgrace the memory of those
who have sacrificed and died, and we will give to the
enemy the victory that he could not hope to win
through his own efforts.
But
we—Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists,
atheists, Jews, Wiccans, and others alike—will
never permit him that wicked satisfaction.
Indeed, though he had hoped to weaken and divide us,
in his folly he has instead hardened the resolve and
united the might of the entire civilized world
against himself and his allies. The clever
ingenuity of his schemes is trivial, compared to the
horrendous stupidity of his action. All of his
brazen acts of murder and destruction are put to
shame by the quiet courage of a single act of mercy
or charity by an emergency worker or private citizen.
Freedom's
enemy is not an individual, an ethnic group, a
religion, or a nationality. It is an irrational
fanaticism which infiltrates all societies, including
our own, feeding on ignorance and hatred wherever it
finds them. Fanaticism knows no boundaries of
geography, ethnicity, faith, or politics. It
lurks not only in distant mountains, forests, and
deserts, but in many of our own pulpits and offices
of state as well. The answer is not more
ignorance and hatred; by acceding to them, we would
not defeat the evil, but rather immerse ourselves in
it. Only wisdom and understanding can hope to
expose and conquer the murderous hatred posing as
righteous wrath.
